A ballad is a short narrative set to song. A folk ballad is generally short and simple, telling a dramatic story using dialogue and action. American folk ballads tend to rhyme and to be divided into stanzas.
The ballad is an enduring musical form and often the first type of song children hear, since many lullabies are ballads. The earliest known American ballads are based on European models, some of which date to the late . American ballads often glorify cowboys, lumberjacks, and other working-class people as opposed to European ballads, which tend to focus on the highborn.
(A recent example is singer Elton John's tribute, written upon the death of Princess Diana, "Candle in the Wind 1997.")
Many American ballads are also based on news events. There are numerous versions of "Stackalee" (or "Stagolee"), which tells about an actual murder said to have taken place in St.
Louis in 1895. While all the versions tell the story somewhat differently, they have in common that "Stagalee, he was a bad man," a theme that runs through many ballads, especially those innovated in prisons, bars, and work camps. This tradition was revived in 1973 when singer-songwriter Jim Croce had a hit song with "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.
" More recent ballads have used historical events to promote patriotic fervor. In 1966, during the , Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler had a top forty radio success with "Ballad of the Green Berets," and almost immediately after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, country singer Alan Jackson's song, "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," went to the top of the country music charts.
Ballads often skip expository material and focus on a particular moment in time, such as the dying words of a young cowboy in "The Streets of ," or in more recent times, the moment at which a woman walks down the street in Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" (1964).
The first collection of ballads published in America was compiled by Francis James Child in a five-volume work, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883–1898). Most early American ballads are variations on the 305 types defined by Child. The early American "Fatal Flower Garden" is based on a ballad identified by Child as "Sir Hugh.
" The original song, which tells of a gruesome child murder, dates as far back as 1255. Few early ballads have a definitive version because they were often sung by unlettered people who did not write them down. In their important 1934 work, American Ballads and Folk Songs, John A.
Lomax and provide twenty-five different categories of songs, many with alternative versions of a particular ballad. Their categories include "Working on the Railroad," "Songs from Southern Chain Gangs," "Negro Bad Men," "Cowboy Songs," "The Miner," "War and Soldiers," "White Spirituals," and "Negro Spirituals." In the first edition of the Dictionary of American History (1976), John A.
Lomax wrote that American ballads tend to follow the pattern of the come-all-ye's and are peopled with working-class characters. Undoubtedly the most popular of indigenous types are the occupational ballads, the bad-man ballad, the murder ballad, and the vulgar or bawdy ballad. As the English loved because he took from the rich to give to the poor, so the American folksinger has commemorated Jesse James.
Probably more than anyone else, the Lomaxes are responsible for recording America's folk heritage, including one of the greatest repositories of its ballads, Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly. They wrote that among the ballads they recorded, beginning in 1932, were many that were too bawdy for print; thus their books often contain sanitized versions of the original work.
The singer Pete Seeger has also been a proponent of recording and singing American ballads in order to keep the songs alive.
The son of a musicologist, Seeger wrote his own songs ("Turn, Turn, Turn") and popularized those of other artists (for example, Leadbelly's "Good-night Irene").
While Seeger and the Lomaxes collected primarily folk ballads, the form has endured in nearly every category of American music including rock, pop, rhythm and blues, jazz, religious, and perhaps especially, country and western. Pop ballads have been sung by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan ("The Times They Are A'changin") and Billy Joel ("Piano Man").
Ray Charles combined blues music with country in his influential ballads (including "I Can't Stop Loving You"). The list of country and western ballads is enormous and some of the titles are an entertainment in themselves.
Poets, including the twentieth-century Anglo-American W.
H. Auden, also wrote poems in a ballad form ("If I Could Tell You," "O Where are You Going"). Some of these works were published as broadsides rather than as music.
Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs.
New York: Macmillan, 1934.
———. Folk Song U.
S.A. New York: New American Library, 1947.
Seeger, Pete. American Favorite Ballads: Tunes and Songs As Sung by Pete Seeger. Edited by Irwin Silber and Ethel Raim.
New York: Oak Publications, 1961.
Smith, Harry, ed. Anthology of American Folk Music.
Smithsonian Folkways compact disks (6).
, and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th cent. The anonymous folk ballad (or popular ballad), was composed to be sung. It was passed along orally from singer to singer, from generation to generation, and from one region to another.
During this progression a particular ballad would undergo many changes in both words and tune. The medieval or ballad that appears in print today is probably only one version of many variant forms.
Primarily based on an older legend or romance, this type of ballad is usually a short, simple song that tells a dramatic story through dialogue and action, briefly alluding to what has gone before and devoting little attention to depth of character, setting, or moral commentary.
It uses simple language, an economy of words, dramatic contrasts, epithets, set phrases, and frequently a stock refrain. The familiar stanza form is four lines, with four or three stresses alternating and with the second and fourth lines rhyming. For example: It was ín and abóut the Mártinmas tíme,
[U+00A0][U+00A0]When the gréen léaves were a fálling,
That Sír John Gráeme, in the Wést Countrÿ,
[U+00A0][U+00A0]Fell in lóve with Bárbara Állan
— “Bonny Barbara Allan”
It was in the 18th cent.
that the term ballad was used in England in its present sense. Scholarly interest in the folk ballad, first aroused by Bishop y's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), was significantly inspired by Sir Walter 's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Francis 's collection, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vol.
, 1882–98), marked the high point of 19th-century ballad scholarship.
More than 300 English and Scottish folk ballads, dating from the 12th to the 16th cent., are extant.
Although the subject matter varies considerably, five major classes of the ballad can be distinguished—the historical, such as “Otterburn” and “The Bonny Earl o' Moray”; the romantic, such as “Barbara Allan” and “The Douglas Tragedy”; the supernatural, such as “The Wife of 's Well”; the nautical, such as “Henry Martin”; and the deeds of folk heroes, such as the cycle.
Ballads, however, cannot be confined to any one period or place; similar subject matter appears in the ballads of other peoples. Indigenous American ballads deal mainly with cowboys, folk heroes such as Casey Jones and , the mountain folk of Kentucky and Tennessee, the Southern black, and famous outlaws, such as Jesse James: Jésse had a wífe to móurn for his lífe,
[U+00A0][U+00A0]Three chíldren, théy were bráve;
But the dírty little cóward that shót Mister Hóward
[U+00A0][U+00A0]Has láid Jesse Jámes in his gráve.
— “Ballad of Jesse James”
During the mid-20th cent. in the United States there was a great resurgence of interest in folk music, particularly in ballads. Singers such as Joan and Pete included ballads like “Bonny Barbara Allan” and “Mary Hamilton” in their concert repertoires; composer-performers such as Woody and Bob wrote their own ballads.
The literary ballad is a narrative poem created by a poet in imitation of the old anonymous folk ballad. Usually the literary ballad is more elaborate and complex; the poet may retain only some of the devices and conventions of the older verse narrative. Literary ballads were quite popular in England during the 19th cent.
Examples of the form are found in Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and 's “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” In music a ballad refers to a simple, often sentimental, song, not usually a folk song.
See D.
C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (1968); B. H.
Bronson, The Ballad as Song (1969); J. Kinsley, ed., The Oxford Book of Ballads (1982); A.
B. Friedman, ed., The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World (1982).
As I hear many men say,
Is the merry month of May. A ballad is a story in a , usually a song or .
Any form of story may be told as a ballad, ranging from accounts of historical events to fairy tales in verse form. It is usually with foreshortened alternating four- and three-stress lines ('ballad meter') and simple repeating , and often with a refrain.
If it is based on political or religious themes, a ballad may then be a version of a .
Ballads should not be confused with the , a 14th and 15th century French verse form.
hawked in English streets from the sixteenth century. They were often topical, humorous, and even subversive; the legends of through broadsheet ballads.
New ballads were written about current events like fires, the birth of monstrous animals, and so forth, giving particulars of names and places. Satirical ballads and ballads contributed to 17th century political discourse. In a sense, these ballads were antecedents of the modern .
tradition, broadsheets and previous anthologies. Percy's publication of and Harley's collections, such as , were of great import in beginning the study of ballads. Some of the collectors also wrote new ballads.
Many ballads are referenced in scholarly works by their number in Child's compilation (see the influenced by ballads, and published a collection he had assembled as The American Songbag (1927).
The form of a ballad was much used in nineteenth century poetry. and signaled the populist intent of their first major work, notably by the Canadian ballads of , in "Road to Mandalay," and in " .
" "The point of view of the killer, murder ballads typically recount the details of the crime — who the victim is, why the murderer decides to kill him or her, how he or she is lured to the murder site and the act itself — followed by the escape and/or capture of the murderer. Often the ballad ends with the murderer in jail or on their way to the gallows, occasionally with a plea for the listener to learn from the evils committed by the speaker.
included in the category of border ballads.
Literary ballads are those composed and written formally. The form, with its connotations of simple folkloric authenticity, became popular with the rise of in the later 18th century. Literary ballads may then be set to music, as , set to a literary ballad by (see also a ballad set into the musical texture may emphasize or play against the theatrical moment.
Atmospheric ballads in operas were A particularly English form, the ballad opera, has as its most famous example 's and (q.v.).
Ballad strophes usually alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, though this is not always the case.
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