Album Notes

14 Songs from Francis J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Songs (1882-1898), plus two Scottish ballads, that all appear in the novel The Drifters by James Michener.
One of the characters from Michener's 1971 novel is Gretchen, a folksinger from Boston and during the course of the novel Gretchen sings all the songs included on this CD compilation. Francis J. Childs was a Boston professor who compiled a collection of "Popular Scottish and English Ballads" giving them numbers. There are many variations of each ballad and Carl sorted through each one to match the closest song from the collection to the version that Gretchen sang. These ballads came over with the early settlers and variants can be found in the American South (Lomax Brothers collection) and Canada (Helen Creighton collection) The CD contains the Scottish and American versions as Gretchen sang them.