Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland, Vol. 1 Review

This CD is an interesting collection of field recordings done by Alan Lomax in Britain and Ireland.The singers are for the most part just regular, older people singing at their homes or pubs.If you are interested in traditional ballads, this is a great CD to check out. It has many singers, singing traditional ballads in traditional styles, without instrumentation.
In that sense, I enjoyed the recordings, because I have read many of the ballads on paper, but did not know how they were sung. But it's not something I'd put on for dinner music.The recording quality is patchy (these are, after all, field recordings), and some of the ballads are spliced together from several singers' renditions-- which is interesting for the subtle variations revealed in style and content from one singer to the next, but I really would have liked to hear just one person sing it all the way through.
The liner notes are actually more like a small book, loaded with historical detail and information about the various singers. There are a couple of annoying transcription errors in the song texts (the sound of a cuckoo clock in the background is written in as part of the lyrics, a chorus is marked incorrectly), but the rest more than makes up for them. It's a fascinating collection, but only if you are interested in folk ballads.

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