Mourning sickness: the musical birth of ‘Barbara Allen’

Abstract

Abstract In his encyclopaedic 1966 study, The British broadside ballad and its music, Claude Simpson regretted the absence of tune directions for ‘such familiar traditional ballads as “Barbara Allen”’. Indeed, although it is by far the most collected traditional song in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America, and versions of its lyric date back to the 17th century, the tune most people know for ‘Barbara Allen’ was not notated until 1840. Using both verbal and melodic parallels from an earlier complex of ballads and tunes, this study proposes that ‘Barbara Allen’ had its origins in the early 17th century, if not the late 16th century, and that it was originally sung to one or more of three surviving tunes entitled ‘Sick, sick and very sick’. One of those is then linked to a 1740 tune called ‘Barbra Allan’, the earliest surviving melody to bear the name.