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Cataloging Information

Search our archive by bibliographic information. Please note that while we are in the process of cataloging ballads, certain categories may be incomplete for some ballads, and search returns performed on some filters may not reflect our entire archive.

Original Text as Printed    Modern Spelling

 (e.g. "1632" or "1600-1700")   Exact Match Only

           

Keyword Search

EBBA Keyword:

Search our ballad entries by keywords assigned to each ballad. Multiple keywords may be selected to narrow your search. See our keyword definitions here.

 advice
 affliction / health
 alcohol
 Americas
 animals / nature
 Bible / biblical figures
 buildings / architecture
 catastrophe
 children
 class
 clothing / appearance
 country / nation
 crime
 death
 economics / commerce
 entertainments
 family
 folklore
 gender
 holidays / seasons
 infidelity
 labor / craft
 law
 London
 love
 maritime
 marriage
 military / war
 monstrosity
 mythology / Classical
 news
 nobility / court
 politics / government
 procreation
 punishment
 race / ethnicity
 religious concepts
 religious figures
 religious groups
 royalty
 rural life
 servitude
 sex / sexuality
 supernatural / magic
 travel
 trickery / deceit
 urban life
 vice
 violence
 virtue
 vulgar humor
 youth / age

Pepys Categories:

Samuel Pepys organized his ballad collection according to specific categories; those categories are reproduced here. Note that these only apply to ballads in the Pepys Collection.

 A Small Promiscuous Supplement
 Devotion & Morality
 Drinking & Good Fellowship
 History - True & Fabulous
 Humour, Frollicks &c
 Love Pleasant
 Love Pleasant and Unfortunate
 Love Unfortunate
 Marriage
 Sea
 State & Times
 Tragedy
 Various Subjects

Music and Recording Information

Search our archive’s ballads by tune title as printed on the sheet, or by the standardized tune titles provided by Claude Simpson in The British Broadside Ballad and its Music. For many of our recorded ballads, we provide an MEI rendering of the music transcription by which you can actively see and hear notes played as well as see the text underlaid, divided, and stressed to each note(s), reflecting the ballad as sung. Please see individual ballad entries (e.g. EBBA 30184) for this feature.

 

Woodcut Images

If a ballad has one or more woodcut illustration, you can click on the Woodcuts tab to see any matching images using the image-matching tool, Arch-V (e.g. EBBA 20933). You will also see the cataloguing information for each image. Coming soon: the ability to also search by this cataloguing information for each woodcut.

Pepys Woodcut Keywords

Search the woodcut impressions in the Pepys Collection by keyword. This tool only applies to Pepys images. EBBA aims to replace this search mechanism solely by the more robust cataloguing described above which will work in tandem with Arch-V image matching.