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Review of Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music

performances in Newfoundland and elsewhere (p. 246). Originally composed by G.W. Hunt and made popular by the stage performances of Alfred Vance in the early 1870s, the song appeared widely on broadsides, in songsters, and on printed sheet music (pp. 250–52). The song made its way to Canada by 1875 and to Newfoundland by the early twentieth century. Once there it was popularized by the publications of local folk icon John Burke, who localized the text to tie it to the Newfoundland experience, and became inextricably linkedwith his name (p. 258). Subsequent publications that identified the song as Burke’s, as well as public memory, strengthened Newfoundland’s emotional claim on ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’. As Guigné astutely points out, the processes of mass distribution and localization worked concurrently to shape the trajectory of this song’s popular usage (p. 262). David Atkinson’s and Steve Roud’s Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America is a wide-ranging attempt to engage with the important and possibly controversial subject of the relationship between print and oral traditions. Although the quality of the writing varies, the content is compelling and raises important questions. Several of the authors are practitioners of traditional song and, as such, have first hand experience with the subject. Unfortunately, any readers hoping to find discussions of the musical content of the songs will be disappointed. Aside from the occasional mention of the tune to which a text was sung, musical considerations are absent from the anthology. This publication, however, is still a highly valuable addition to the field of folk song and ballad scholarship and students of the discipline would be well served in reading it.