The Chivalrous Crickets: The Mythical Ballads of Anna Gordon Brown

Philadelphia-based folk/Early Music crossover ensemble The Chivalrous Crickets bring to life the captivating musical personality of one of history's most acclaimed folk singers and tradition-bearers. A generation before the Scottish and English ballads were made world-popular by Francis James Childs, fifty of them were collected from a reverend's wife, known as "Mrs. Brown of Faulkland" discovered in northeastern Scotland. Now considered one of the most important original sources of Scottish balladry, this remarkable 18th-century woman's song variants are known for their "uniquely feminist perspective, and carry behind their courtly and magical façade a frequently brutal reality. The ambiance is of love and death, the cruelties of fate and chance, and of perilous, enchanted wooings".