#also don't use Wikipedia sjdkdkdo

[cruelsister-moved]

I hate the concept of the child ballads at this point like. they're just ballads that existed in the tradition before child and they've existed after him, he was literally just some american guy and his classism, misogny, racism, and general bad practise made his work by today's standards wildly unreliable but ballad scholarship is all quite ropey so we're just used to making do with that stuff. most of his ballads weren't collected directly from oral tradition; many were taken from the work of other collectors and many were collected from oral tradition later so there's very little that would've been completely lost without child - especially since he literally didn't collect tunes and deliberately left out tons of beautiful ballads with very flimsy justification.

'The Child Ballads' are not any sort of coherent category of song and none of the songs in the collection owe any sort of allegiance to child, also casting such a net into the waters of british and american balladry is just excluding a bunch of other similar ballads for no reason except 150 year old classism. through the second revival his work kind of cycled back around to be a part of folk tradition in its own right but the concept of the child ballads as an inherent category of folk music is only like 50 years old and it literally just means ballads that child put in his book so acting like thats an inherent part of their identity is like idk calling a word that appears in the Oxford English dictionary an 'Oxford word'