Modern Street Ballads — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Singer's Repertoire and the Rhythm of the Street

The introduction includes a portion of 'Chaunting Benny,' a meta-ballad that lists dozens of song titles in a single breath: 'Have you seen "My daughter Fan," "She wore a wreath of roses," / And here you see "My son Tom," "The Sun that lights the roses."' This catalogue mimics the singer's patter, a rapid-fire inventory meant to hook a passing crowd. The rhythm is insistent, almost breathless, and the titles themselves—'Such a getting out of bed,' 'What a shocking bad hat'—suggest a world of domestic mishap and urban absurdity. The ballads that follow share this tempo: they are built for recitation, with strong end-rhymes and refrains that invite audience participation. 'The King and West Countryman' uses a 'Ri tooral, looral' chorus, a nonsense hook that would have been easy to shout along. The meter is often irregular, bent to fit the tune or the singer's emphasis, and the language is deliberately plain—'Now this owd chap to Lunnun had come'—preserving the dialect of the original performers.

Dialect, Defiance, and the Comic Misunderstanding

Several ballads hinge on a countryman's encounter with urban or aristocratic power, and the humor comes from the gap between the speaker's plain speech and the world he stumbles into. In 'The King and West Countryman,' a farmer with a lease dispute travels to London, mistakes the King for a fairground performer ('I've seen finer Kings at Bartlemy Fair'), and offers him a shilling to sign his papers. The King plays along, rewarding him with ten pounds—but the farmer, on learning the sum, 'dommed his wig if he'd gi'en him the shilling.' The joke is double-edged: the farmer's ignorance is comic, but his bluntness also exposes the absurdity of courtly deference. 'Hodge in London' works a similar vein: John Hodge, told that London's streets are paved with gold, finds only stone, and is tricked out of his guinea by a boy who pretends to have been robbed. The ballad ends with Hodge 'trembling and quaking for fear,' caught in a legal trap he cannot understand. These songs side with the dupe, not the trickster, and their dialect—'I'ze gotten for you, a bit of a job'—is a marker of authenticity, not ignorance.

Violence, Sport, and the Unflinching Eye

Not all the ballads are light. 'The Bonny Grey' recounts a cockfight with grim specificity: 'The Charcoal Black, and the Bonny Grey' are matched for twenty guineas, and Lord Derby himself bets on the outcome. The fight is described in four terse stanzas—'the Charcoal he lay dead at last'—and the winners 'carried away the Bonny Grey.' There is no moralizing, no condemnation; the ballad simply reports the event as a spectator might, with the same flat tone used for a horse race or a boxing match. Ashton's introduction notes that the ballads were 'absolutely contemporary with the events they describe,' and this one reads like a dispatch from the pit. The violence is matter-of-fact, part of the texture of working-class leisure. The same unflinching eye appears in 'Chaunting Benny's' list, which includes 'Poor Bessie was a Sailor's bride' and 'Brave Lord Ullin's daughter'—tragedy and comedy jostling for the same penny. The collection does not flinch from the hard edges of its world; it simply sings them.

Ashton's ballads are best read aloud, with an ear for the dropped consonants and the shifting meter. The woodcuts—often generic, sometimes comically mismatched—are part of the charm, but the real pleasure is in the voices: the farmer who talks back to the King, the cockfighter who counts his winnings, the singer who rattles off fifty titles without taking a breath. These are not polished poems; they are performances, preserved on the page like a snapshot of a street corner in full cry.

The rain kept insistently tapping the window while I lingered over a cockfighting ballad, its crooked meter almost singing itself. It struck me how those singers poured feeling into scrawled verses. Later, searching for something gentler, I stumbled upon this other collection: Victorian Songs: Lyrics of the Affections and Nature — Reading Notes. The contrast felt natural, like moving from a crowded street into a quiet garden.