The Tunes
[Bronson Stack]In 1972, Bertrand Bronson published the fourth and final volume of The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, the culmination of decades of work gathering and organizing all of the available tunes for Child's ballad texts.
The collection, nearly 2,200 pages of tunes and texts with notation for 4,120 tunes, was hailed as a milestone in ballad scholarship and has never been surpassed.
Loomis House Press, in collaboration with CAMSCO Music and Princeton University Press, is pleased to make Bronson's masterwork available to a new generation of scholars and musicians, and at 1970's prices. The original volumes sold for $40 each; our facsimile edition is $40 per volume for paperback, and only $50 each for a durable library/textbook binding (pictured).
Never been fortunate enough to browse a copy of Bronson? Check out a sample chapter.
Not able to invest in the full set? You can still enjoy the fruit of Bronson's labors:
[Singing Tradition]The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads is a single-volume, abridged edition of Bronson's four volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. To create this edition, Bronson selected from the larger work those tunes and texts which had the strongest representation in the oral tradition, excluding those from the original collection which only existed in print. Most of Child's 305 ballads are represented.