Tom Pettitt has written with news of a great piece of work on murdered sweetheart ballads:
‘I was wondering if the Newsletter might be an appropriate place to report that my work on the Murdered Sweetheart Ballads has provisionally culminated in a ca 300pp. ‘Internet Paper’, “The English Murdered Sweetheart Ballads: A Discursive Catalogue”, accessible online at https://www.academia.edu/45536338/, which conglomerates, updates and replaces the previously uploaded papers on individual ballads and ballad-groups. It covers all the 60 songs qualifying under this heading, listing the broadside and chapbook issues, and their surviving copies, known to me, plus, where relevant, recordings from ‘source singers’ in performance tradition (ca 6 cases). Each entry has a lengthy (‘discursive’) headnote concerning the ballad or group concerned (‘groups’ comprise both multiple songs on the same case, or the same song (with different names and places) applied to several (alleged) cases. This should also be taken as saying that corrections and suggestions for improvement will be gratefully received.’
Addition – Following his talk at the 30 May TSF Online meeting Tom tells me that he has now uploaded the text of his TSF Zoom 25 paper, “Margaret Clarke: the First Murdered Sweetheart?”, together with the two hand outs, to https://www.academia.edu/49091326/. A few remarks omitted on the day have been restored, and the concluding speculations considerably expanded.