The Ballad World of Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland

Abstract This book contains the known facts and the family stories of the eighteenth-century Forbes and Gordons in the North-east of Scotland; an introduction to Scottish ballads, with examples from Anna Gordon’s repertoire; and an introduction to a middle-class woman’s education and social position during the Scottish Enlightenment. Women were the tradition-bearers in Scottish balladry—this great verbal and musical art form of Anglo-American culture. The historical context for this included the following: –Scottish culture is steeped in traditional music, and song formed a prominent part of literary culture;–intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment were particularly interested in the ballad tradition;–Scotland was highly literate in the eighteenth century relative to the rest of Europe;–Scottish society was more democratic than English society, perhaps because after 1603 the aristocrats followed the court to London;–Scottish women occupied a stronger social position in society than English women;–ballads have the narrative structure of dreams;–thanks to the far-flung Scottish diaspora, ballads were distributed throughout the Atlantic world;–educated Scots were prominent in settling the Southern states of America, bringing their ballads with them;–ballads are frequently thought of as depicting a violent, warrior society, but their scope is much wider—especially in the repertoires of women;–Anna Brown’s ballads were written down for William Tytler in the 1780s and considered the finest in the tradition by Francis James Child. They were first published by Matthew Lewis, Robert Jamieson, and Walter Scott, all of whom altered some of the texts.