Modern Street Ballads is a generous collection of early 19th-century street ballads. Ballads developed out of minstrelsy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuri

In The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878-1903, E. David Gregory provides a reliable and comprehensive history of the birt

In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into ’street literature’ -