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This book is a biographical study of unprecedented scope and detail of the celebrated Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland, whose magnificent repertory of old Scottish ballads attracted the fascinated attention of intellectuals and song collectors during the later years of the eighteenth century. Her ballads--the earliest to be gathered from a named living person--were recognized by the great Francis James Child as a unique source in the Anglo/Scottish tradition, superior in quality to all other versions.
Anna Gordon was a literary woman, with a strongly intellectual middle-class background, educated by her father, a professor in one of Scotland's four universities who, himself, made significant contributions to Scottish Enlightenment thinking about literacy and the nature of language. She lived at the intersection of several different worlds, reflecting balladry, oral tradition and women's culture, as well as Enlightenment debates about orality and literacy and the rapidly-expanding imperial enterprise. The story encompasses three generations of her remarkable family as they entered the wider Atlantic world, with adventures in Scotland, Virginia, and the West Indies, including an elopement and a duel, capture by pirates, and an evening party given by George Washington.
The book includes an examination of the complex musical and cultural context from which Anna Gordon sprang. Threaded throughout are discussions of the ballads that brought her fame, revealing the deep importance of traditional music in Scottish society and the centrality of women as tradition-bearers in balladry, one of the great verbal and musical art-forms of Western Europe. Historically-informed audio recordings of twelve ballads from her original manuscripts with musical settings based on the notations of her gifted nephew, Robert Eden Scott, have been made for an accompanying website specially created for this book by leading Scottish folk musicians.
