This new PlanetSlade book – my fourth – contains all the bushranger ballads essays which once filled this section of the site. They’ve been available here as free online pieces for five years, but now I’m asking people to buy the book instead.
Bushranger ballads are the home-grown 19th century Australian songs about the colony’s most notorious highwaymen. Bold, defiant thieves like Jack Donohoe and Ben Hall are still hailed as heroic underdogs there today and still have a strong influence on Australia’s rebel music. The book discusses these songs’ Irish roots, the transportee convicts who spread them round the country and the young musicians performing them today. Key songs like Streets of Forbes and The Wild Colonial Boy each get an essay of their own, teasing out their musical history and the true crime stories behind them.
Also in the book, you’ll find a lengthy section looking at Victorian Britain’s execution songs. These gallows ballads were the cheap, one-sheet publications knocked out by jobbing print shops for sale to the eager spectators at every public hanging. Typically, they’d include a lurid account of the condemned man’s crime, plus a set of ballad verses describing his downfall in song. A particularly popular hanging would produce many rival ballad sheets, the combined sales of which could reach 2.5m copies.
All these delights can now be yours in either paperback or e-book form for the price of a couple of drinks. Head over to Amazon US, Amazon UK or Amazon Australia to buy your copy now!
