Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

From Harry Stiles to Taylor Swift, today's pop stars are household names and their songs known across the globe.

But how did people consume popular music in the past?

Well, Professor Christopher Marsh and Dr. Angela McShane, a part of a new project called

The Hundred Ballads Project, which has been investigating this very question.

They spoke to Charlotte Hodgman about just what made a smash hit in the 17th century and shared some excerpts from ballads of

the time, performed and recorded especially for their project. Angela and Christopher, thank you so

much for joining us today. It looks like a fascinating project.

I have a great fun going through the website and listening to these ballads that you've been working on.

Maybe we can start with perhaps by telling us a little bit about the project and actually what it is.

It's a project to kind of bring to the public 120 hit songs from the 17th century. So a broadside ballad was a, was a sheet

song that sold roughly for a penny apiece in marketplaces and alehouses and so on. And so what

we've done is sort of gather up information on which of these songs were the most successful at the time.

They're regularly kind of used by historians and by literary specialists,

a little bit by musicologists, but not so much.

So through a very sort of complicated process, we tried to work out which were the sort of top,

top hundred songs.

And then we put them all together with digital images of the sheets,

because they're sheet songs.

On a website, we got in touch with the brilliant Andy Watts

and the Carnival Band to help with the recordings.

Andy then invited lots of extra singers.

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