Ballads

Images and text are of old English Ballads and tell the stories of women’s lives. This is part of a continuous project to research women’s social history through song.

Black is the Color

The Unquiet Grave

Pretty Polly

False Sir John

We have fed you all for a thousand years an 1908 update to a poem written by Rudyard Kipling in 1893.

Ballad of Springhill by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl.

False Sir John, a traditional English ballad in which a man courts a young woman only to lure her to a cliff where he plans to kill her.

“We have fed you all for a thousand years” embroidered on shirt