Tyler Clark presents: Local Mythologies writesTop Five: Child Ballads Recorded By Unexpected Artists

When they were originally collected in the 1850s by folklorist Francis James Child, the 305 songs of the Child Ballads codified English and Scottish oral folk traditions dating as far back as the 1400s. In the 1960s, they helped folk revivalists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Fairport Convention add authentic dashes of ghostly romance and gratuitous swordplay to their setlists. Today, they're still creeping up on records, often assuming the shape of an artist's own musical vision. This week, I tracked down five contemporary acts who weren't afraid to add their own spin to songs that are older than all of their ages combined.

1) Ween - "Cold Blows The Wind" (1997)

Based on: "The Unquiet Grave"
Ballad synopsis: A girl cries on her lover's grave hard enough to wake him up. Fearing increased traffic in the cemetery, he asks her to let him stay dead.
How they made it their own: Surrounding it with weirdness. "Cold Blows The Wind" appears on the second half of The Mollusk, Dean and Gene Ween's woozy nautical send-up of '70s Hobbit-prog excesses. By the time listeners get there, they'll have heard a warped vaudeville pump-up track ("Dancing In The Show Tonight"), a nihilistic Irish drinking song ("The Blarney Stone"), and a song about a mystical conch ("The Mollusk"). Amid these musical tricks, a 600-year-old sea ballad about an undead lover seems downright relatable.

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