I loved him in the greenwood all out in wind and rain

Ellis Peters' Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart (1967) is a fascinating misdirection. Its debt to British folk music runs deeper than the corrosive filk which furnishes its title or its setting of students and singers convened for the weekend at an eccentrically independent music college just taking the plunge into the zeitgeist, but only in its final pages does it come fully clear as a modern twist on the ballad which serves as the code of its climax—specifically the version recorded by Ewan MacColl, so well disguised by all the cross-currents of the crime that even though the central events of the novel conform almost point by point to their Child originals, until the connection is made at first unconsciously by a character who finds a verse from her professional repertoire chiming a little ironically with the investigation that has enveloped the conference at Follymead, even a reader who has spent the last ten days on a jag of the British folk revival may not twig to the retelling. I feel as though my horizons of Peters have been suddenly widened. Structurally, but also tonally in its oblique and self-referential treatment of its source material, it's a lot closer to Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (1974) or Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (1998) than to any of the Cadfael mysteries; in that its series characters are more witnesses than detectives of privately momentous events, it reminded me also of Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1962). Other aspects of the novel feel more opaque to me: partly because Peters demonstrates her familiarity with the folk music of the time, its cast of musicians feels as though they could be roman à clef and I couldn't make any of them come into focus, at least not as individuals. The Scottish singer introduced by his contribution of "two Tyne-side colliery songs and 'The Bonny Earl of Moray'" and later overheard doing "Geordie" seems the likely product of listening to a lot of MacColl and A. L. Lloyd. There's a weird jab at Tom Lehrer and an even weirder shout-out to Václav Havel. The canonical description of the ballad-singer Liri Palmer which appears on the first page of the novel—

The girl with the guitar-case [. . .] was perhaps nineteen or twenty, tall, slim, and of striking appearance. Her face was thin, richly coloured, with long, fine-drawn features and large, calm, fierce eyes as blue as steel. Her great fell of heavy brown hair coiled and spilled around her face with a dynamic life of its own, and was gathered into a waist-long braid as thick as her wrist, interwoven with narrow strips of soft red leather, as though only tethers strong enough for horses could confine it.

—translated itself promptly inside my head into an illustration by Greer Gilman. I had never read this book despite the uncertain conviction that I brought it home for my mother ages ago after we ran out of Cadfaels with which to present her; would recommend for its under-the-radar retelling and its snapshot of a scene which I am now curious how deeply Peters was involved in. She doesn't write of its music as if she merely put on a couple of LPs for atmosphere. "This is human, which is more than being folk."