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Oxford Ramble

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Jack-in-the-Green

A Taste of Ale

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The Robber Bird

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The 25th


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Two Ravens

Jack-in-the-Green track 15

This is a bit of a concoction. The words are an anglicised version of the Scottish lyrics printed in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, under the title Twa Corbies (two crows or two ravens). The tune, which I found in Bronson's Tunes of the Child Ballads Volume 1, was collected by Winston Wilkinson from James H. Chisholm, Greenwood, Virginia on March 12th 1936. The same singer had sung it - with some differences in the phrasing of the tune - to Cecil Sharp eighteen years earlier.

The tune is very closely related to the Sacred Harp tune Windham. The composer of Windham is credited as Daniel Read, 1785, but it is entirely plausible that his hymn tune setting was based on an already-existing ballad tune.

Here's a recording of Windham being sung at a 2011 Sacred Harp singing in Texas.