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What are some nursery rhymes, folk/fairy tales, or holiday stories you remember being told growing up?

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What are some nursery rhymes, folk/fairy tales, or holiday stories you remember being told growing up?

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Francis J. Child's five volume work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898

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Francis J. Child's five volume work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898

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Francis J. Child Ballads; with Biography of Child, Complete List of Child Ballads, Lyrics, Tune Information, Midis, Historical Background and Tune Related Links

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Traditional ballads are narrative folksongs - simply put, they are folksongs that tell stories. They tell all kinds of stories, including histories, legends, fairy tales, animal fables, jokes, and tales of outlaws and star-crossed lovers. ("Ballad" is a term also used in the recording industry for slow, romantic songs, but these should not be confused with traditional or folk ballads.) Many traditional ballads came to North America with settlers from Europe. Others were composed in North America and tell stories or relate ideas that tell us about the attitudes and experiences of our nation as it developed.

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Introduction

Traditional ballads are narrative folksongs - simply put, they are folksongs that tell stories. They tell all kinds of stories, including histories, legends, fairy tales, animal fables, jokes, and tales of outlaws and star-crossed lovers. ("Ballad" is a term also used in the recording industry for slow, romantic songs, but these should not be confused with traditional or folk ballads.) Many traditional ballads came to North America with settlers from Europe. Others were composed in North America and tell stories or relate ideas that tell us about the attitudes and experiences of our nation as it developed.

Playlist

Five recordings from Library of Congress collections

The Last Fierce Charge
Sung by Warde Ford. This Civil War ballad in which both protagonists die was used as a plea for peace during the war.

Milwaukee fire
Sung by Robert Walker. Walker was the uncle of ballad singers Warde, Pat, and Bogue Ford. They are an example of a family that handed down American, British, and Irish ballads, singing them in a traditional unembellished style.

Whaling song
An occupational ballad sung by James H. Gibbs, who learned it as a boy on Nantucket, and who also spent time working as a whaler in his youth.

Sung by Woody Guthrie in 1941. This is an example of a British ballad brought to the United States by settlers and documented by James Francis Child.

Lament of the Old Sourdough
A ballad of the Nome, Alaska, gold rush of 1899-1909, sung by Paul Roseland in 1975. Lyrics by Sam C. Dunham, 1901.

Some older ballads derive from songs composed by traveling minstrels who made their living through song in the houses of noblemen. Minstrels composed narrative songs describing love stories, historical battles and events, legends, and journeys to far off lands. As these songs were intended as entertainment, they had meters and melodies appropriate for dancing and were often sung with musical accompaniment. Early ballads, which in English date to before 1600, may also be derived from other medieval sources, including metrical romances, folk tales, and apocryphal gospels about the life of Jesus. Some early ballads from this tradition traveled to North America with the first European settlers. Margaret MacArthur, a folklorist and singer, performed some examples of the earliest known ballads brought to North America in her concert at the Library of Congress in 2005.

"King John and the Bishop of Canterbury," tells a story about King John of England, who ruled from 1199 until 1216. Similarly, " The Death of Queen Jane," sung for the Library's Archive of Folk Song by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1949, recounts the story of the birth of King Edward VI of England, and the death in childbirth of his mother, Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII. Such historical ballads are often assumed to have been composed not long after the events they describe, although usually this is difficult to prove. " Mr. Frog," a folktale ballad about a frog who marries a mouse, which was sung for the Library of Congress by Pearl Nye, derives from a ballad that was first mentioned in 1548, and for which a full text survives from 1611.

The earliest ballads were often composed for the entertainment of the wealthy, but as printing became available, they were spread through printed lyrics, inexpensively published on one side of a piece of paper. Such a sheet was called a broadside or song sheet. Song sheets contained both lyric songs and ballads and were often sold by street vendors at cheap prices. Typically, such sheets contained only the words to the song, with no musical notation. Sometimes, the name of the intended melody was given, and the buyer was assumed to know the tune already. Vendors were frequently also singers who could demonstrate the proper melody to a buyer. Finally, purchasers of broadsides were also free to compose their own tunes, or to fit the song to any existing melody. In this way, the same ballad text often entered the oral tradition with many different tunes attached. The most common singing style was a cappella, perhaps because ordinary people had limited access to musical instruments.

By the late nineteenth century, scholars had begun studying the ballad tradition, both in Britain and America. Harvard Scholar Francis James Child collected early ballads from manuscript sources, and attempted to identify the earliest versions. His collection and documentation's final form was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. In this influential book, published in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898, Child created a system of numbers for the ballads he collected, which some scholars still use today as an indexing tool. For more on this, see the essay, " Francis James Child and The English and Scottish Popular Ballads."

Detail from Battle of Lake Erie. Percy Moran, 1911. Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6893. Ballads that describe historic events, such as "Perry's Victory," can give us insights into how they were viewed or debated by people at the time.

Ballads and Epics

The oldest narrative songs were epics, poems about historical events and legends, some of which are ancient. Epics are typically too long to remember word-for-word, and therefore are composed in performance through a process that involves inserting verbal formulas into a traditional structural framework. They are often chanted, and many of them take days to perform. They are commonly sung without instrumentation or with a simple accompaniment such as a stringed instrument. John Soininen, in this field recording from 1939, provides an excerpt from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, " Vaka vanha Vainamoinen." Another example is an excerpt from the Croatian Epic of Kosovo, sung in Serbo-Croatian by Peter Boro, who accompanies himself on a stringed instrument called a gusle. The melodies in these songs are very simple, as the focus for the listener was intended to be on the telling of the tale, while the chanting and rhymed lines help the singer to remember the verses.

Unlike epics, ballads are typically remembered word-for-word and sung to fully developed melodies. They became distinct from epics and acquired the features we recognize today during the Middle Ages. The word "ballad" is derived from a Latin root meaning "dance," which has led to the theory that early ballads were used for dancing. Some support for this theory comes from the fact that ballads are sung for dancing in some parts of Europe today, but how old and widespread a tradition this is has never been established with certainty.

Detail from Broadside of Revolutionary War period: Tea Destroyed by Indians. ca. 1773. Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-53319 "Broadsides" or "song sheets" such as this were an inexpensive way to market the lyrics to songs, used extensively in the Americas beginning in the Colonial period. This example celebrates the Boston Tea Party.

Broadside Ballads

Alongside the older traditional ballads they helped to spread, printing companies also composed new ballads, frequently employing poets for this purpose. In addition to providing entertainment, such new ballads became a means of spreading news, gossip, and political commentary of the day. Ballads composed for the cheap print market are seen by scholars as a separate class of ballads from the earlier ballad tradition, and are usually referred to as "broadside ballads." The subject matter of these ballads often concerns the lives of common people. They can be reminiscent of stories in the tabloid press today, intending to persuade, shock, or amaze with tales of murders, disasters, and extraordinary events. A broadside ballad frequently known as "The Wild and Wicked Youth" in Britain and Ireland, which tells the story of a young man who becomes a thief to support his wife, and who is caught and executed for his crime, became a widespread folksong in the United States under the title " The Roving Boy." It was sung for the Library of Congress by Justus Begley of Hazard, Kentucky, in 1937.

European Ballads in America

Ballads as sung in North America, while preserving many qualities of the songs as they were sung in Britain and Ireland, also introduced changes through the process of transmission from one singer to another. In some cases the British ballads were made more American as the singers recalled them. For example, Mary Sullivan sings a ballad known in England as "Young Beichan," or "Lord Bateman," which she learned as " Lloyd Bateman" Since the United States does not recognize aristocratic titles, she calls the protagonist a "gentleman" rather than a Lord. In early English versions of this ballad, the young protagonist sets sail from England for the Middle East, where he is captured and held captive for ransom. In Sullivan's version, Bateman sets sail for Turkey from the coast of Georgia in the United States. The version of " The Farmer's Curst Wife" performed by Asa Davis of Vermont strongly reflects the singer's Irish background. A more American-sounding version, with the alternate title " Reason Why That Women Is Wiser Than Men," sung by Lum Wilson "Bill" Jackson of California, shows that the ballad became more thoroughly American in some locations.

Ballads from many countries and languages have arrived in North America with immigrants. Listen to the Finnish murder ballad " Velisurmaaja" sung by John Soininen and notice the melodic qualities that are absent from the example performed by the same singer from the epic, the Kalevala, mentioned above. An outlaw ballad, "Utott-kopott oreg csarda" (The Old Tavern), sung by Mary Gaidos of California, demonstrates the style of ballad brought to the United States by immigrants from Hungary. Welsh coal miners brought the ballad " The Miner's Doom," which was then picked up and sung by many American coal miners, including Daniel Walsh of Pennsylvania, who sang this version.

Eastern European ballads often show a relationship with the epic tradition. For example, old Russian ballads such as " Alaskan Promyshlenniki," performed by John Panamarkoff, is chanted, like an epic, rather than sung. The recording is an excerpt from a long ballad about settlers traveling to Alaska in 1808. " Mogatz Mirza," an Armenian outlaw ballad sung by Ruben J. Baboyan in California in 1939, still uses a simple melody, but allows the singer more opportunities to show off his voice and give emotional expression to the story than in the Russian example.

Some ballads traveled from country to country, translated along the way by polyglot singers. " Six ans sur mer" (Six Years at Sea), sung by Elita, Mary, and Ella Hoffpauir of New Iberia, Louisiana, is a ballad with a widespread international distribution. It is known in Britain, Spain, Scandinavia, and other areas, but is best known in France, where the Hoffpauirs' version surely originated. It concerns a ship lost at sea, in which the sailors are forced to draw lots to see which of them will be eaten; after the decision is made but before it is implemented, they are rescued.

Native American Ballads

Ballads composed in the United States and passed along in tradition tell stories and legends on many topics. While retaining recognizable European roots, they developed in ways that reflect the regional differences in songs of the United States. One of the earliest known ballads composed in the American colonies is "Springfield Mountain," a song about the death by snakebite of Timothy Merrick in Wilbraham, Massachusetts in 1761. The tale was particularly tragic because Merrick was very young, and also because he was to be married the following day. Two versions of this ballad were written down in the nineteenth century, and an account of the events leading to Merrick's death was published in 1914. Detailed information such as this is unusual for songs in oral tradition and helps historians to date the beginnings of what are called "native" American ballads, that is, those composed in North America. As often happens when songs are transmitted orally, this tragic ballad changed and became more lyric, as in this example called " Young Johnny," sung by Winifred Bundy in 1941.

As colonial printers set up their shops in the 1700s, sheets containing song lyrics were printed and marketed in North America. These included British and Irish ballads along with ballads composed in North America. During the American Revolutionary War, ballads about battles and heroes were used to build support among the colonists. An example is a song sheet with the ballad "Britania's Disgrace," and a lyric song, "Lamentation of Lady Washington." [2] "Britania's Disgrace" is a song about the battles to secure strategic ports in New York and New Jersey. Though undated by the publisher, the lyrics of the ballad relate events that took place between 1775 and 1777.

Such historical ballads also entered oral tradition, where they were passed on by word of mouth until modern times. " The Bombardment of Bristol," here sung by Sam Hinton, tells of the bombing of Bristol, Rhode Island by a British ship during the American Revolution in 1775. (Bristol was bombed again in 1778.) Though of unknown age, the ballad has a style consistent with it being from the era of the war. Though the town was severely damaged, the song seems to make light of the event. This reflected a "Yankee" attitude of the time that often portrayed the British forces as inept, though Britain was one of the great military powers of the age. Similarly, the U.S. Navy's early victories in the War of 1812 were cast as a humiliating defeat for England by American ballad-writers, as Pearl Nye's version of " Perry's Victory" makes clear. Perhaps it was songs like this that helped American soldiers face the coming battles.

Some ballads seem to have been composed to promote a particular point of view about an historical event. For example, " Custer's Last Charge," sung by Warde Ford, is about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which was a conflict between the United States Army Seventh Cavalry Regiment and a much larger confederation of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The song depicts Commander George Armstrong Custer and the 267 men who died with him as a martyrs and heroes. Because Custer used poor judgment in planning his attack, and because the American Indian tribes were defending lands that they had been given by the United States by treaty, historians today do not view Custer's actions as heroic. But the ballad preserves the attitude of a particular era, which painted the American Indians as the enemy regardless of their treaty rights, a situation worth reflecting upon.

" The Cumberland's Crew," sung by Pearl Nye, and " The Iron Merrimac," sung by Judge Learned Hand, are examples of ballads that offer a biased perspective on historical events. Both concern the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8-9, 1862, during the Civil War. (Hampton Roads is a strategic shipping lane at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, off the shore of Virginia.) "The Cumberland's Crew" tells of conflict between the sloop USS Cumberland and the ironclad Confederate ship CSS Virginia, which had been constructed out of the hull of a raised Union ship, the USS Merrimack (also spelled "Merrimac"). The wooden USS Cumberland was rammed and sunk by the ironclad in a devastating show of the power of this new type of warship. But rather than focusing on the defeat, the ballad extols the heroism and patriotism of the sailors in the USS Cumberland. The second day of the battle pitched two ironclads against each other for the first time in history, as the Union's USS Monitor arrived and took on the CSS Virginia (remembered both in song and in news reports of the day as "the Merrimack"). Although this battle of the ironclads is generally regarded as a draw by historians, the ballad "Iron Merrimac," promotes the view of the Union proponents that the battle was a Union victory.

French-American and Spanish-American Ballads

Ballads in the French and Spanish languages, both brought from abroad and composed in America, have a long history in the United States, since large portions of the country were settled by French and Spanish colonists before they became part of the United States or experienced significant Anglophone influence. Marce Lacouture, David Greely, and Kristi Guillory performed French songs of Louisiana at a concert at the Library of Congress in 2010. They learned the second song they perform, "Belle," from a 1934 Library of Congress field recording, of a singer known only as Mr. Bornu. It is a ballad composed in Louisiana, about a man who travels from Louisiana to Texas only to learn his sweetheart has fallen ill back home. He returns to Louisiana and sells his horse Henry to pay for her treatment. (The song occurs at 7:45 of the webcast.) "Isabeau s'y promène," sung by Lacouture and Greely (at 25:00 of the webcast), is a North American version of an old French ballad about a sailor who drowns trying to retrieve a gold ring lost by the girl he is courting. This version is one that Lacouture learned from a ballad singer in New Orleans, Louisiana. The classically trained Canadian singer Eva Gauthier made a commercial recording of the same ballad as an art song, demonstrating that French songs are distributed throughout North America, and also providing a sense of how traditional ballads can be adapted for different musical styles.

Spanish language ballads from Mexico and from states that were once part of Mexico describe the Spanish settlement of North America and the events leading to the formation of modern Mexico. Corridos, as these songs are called in Spanish, were used for dancing and entertainment, and influenced the development of song styles in the West. José Suarez was a blind singer in Brownsville, Texas, who memorized and performed many corridos. Field recordings of some of his repertoire were made by John and Ruby Lomax in 1939 and are available in this presentation. " Corrido villésta de la toma de Matamoros," is a song from the Mexican Revolution describing the siege of Matamoros, which is across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, in 1913. This violent event caused Mexican townspeople to flee over the border, thus affecting both countries. " Diecinueve de enero," also called "El Corrido de José Mosqueda" is another corrido from the Mexico-U.S. border. It describes the robbery of a derailed train by a bandit, José Mosqueda, who is credited in the ballad with having caused the train wreck. (The historical facts are not clear.) The outlaws gave their ill-gotten gains to townspeople, probably to evade the law, leading to the gang being treated as heroes, in a legend similar to that of Robin Hood.

Jesse James. c1882. Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-3854. The killing of this outlaw on April 3,1882 became the subject of a ballad.

Ballad Themes: Heroes, Outlaws, Murderers, and Workers

Ballads that originated in the United States often celebrate heroic Americans. " Casey Jones," relates the tragic death of train engineer Luther "Casey" Jones when his train, the Cannonball Express, collided with a stalled freight train in Vaughn, Mississippi in the early hours of April 30, 1900. Jones was the only fatality in the crash, having told his fireman, Simeon T. Webb, to jump before the impact. The ballad created a legend of an engineer who gave his life for the passengers and crew. Some versions name "Vanderbilt's daughter" as a passenger saved by Jones, which is an embellishment to add to his heroism. Some of the historical facts of the crash are disputed, as the Illinois Railroad investigation found that Jones had missed a flagman and held him responsible for the accident, while, for the rest of his life, Simeon Webb testified that no flagman could be seen.

"John Henry," a similar hero ballad from the African American tradition, tells the story of a "steel driver," that is, a worker who drills holes in rocks for dynamite in order to blast a railway tunnel. In the song John Henry pits himself against a steam-powered drilling machine and wins, but dies in the effort. Though many suspect this legend to have its origins in fact, the historical John Henry remains elusive. The enduring appeal of the song is in its depiction of the American worker as heroic and in its valuing humans refusing to bow in the face of industrial progress. It has been particularly important in depicting a heroic black working man devoted to both his job and his family. In general, African American ballads often describe attributes of the ballad's hero, merely alluding to the details of his story, and many versions of "John Henry" follow this pattern. For more on " John Henry," including several sound recordings, see the article about this song.

On the other hand, some ballads celebrated anti-heroes, especially outlaws and criminals. Historically outlaws were sometimes romanticized in the press and popular stories as well as in songs. Ruthless criminals might be treated as "Robin Hoods." Jesse James was a leader of a gang that committed violent robberies of banks and trains in several states in the aftermath of the Civil War. The gang was pursued aggressively by authorities and by 1880 several members of the gang had been captured or killed. James went back to his home state of Missouri, hired brothers Charley and Robert Ford both to assist in robberies and to live in his home as protection for himself and his family. The Ford brothers decided to seek the bounty offered for James, so Robert Ford shot him in his own home. The ballad " Jesse James," here sung by E. A. Briggs, is about betrayal, focusing on James' murder by a trusted friend. A widely distributed ballad, it helped create a folk hero out of an outlaw. On the other hand, " The James and Younger Boys," sung by O.C. "Cotton" Davis in 1941, is told from the point of view of James's accomplice Cole Younger. It presents a more realistic picture of outlawry, and expresses regret for the gang's crimes. As with hero ballads, African Americans had their own outlaw ballads, often known as "bad man ballads," which described, often with ambivalent feelings, violent crimes in defiance of white authority. " Bad Man Ballad," (perhaps titled by the collector) was sung for John Lomax by Willie Rayford in 1939.

Murder was another frequent topic of American ballads. Some murder ballads were based on British originals, such as " Pretty Polly," which was sung for the Library of Congress by Pete Steele of Hamilton, Ohio, in 1938. This song derives from an English ballad known as "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter." But many other murder ballads were composed in America, especially after famous murder cases. An example is " Pearl Bryant," a fictionalized account of the murder of Pearl Bryan in Kentucky in 1896. Murder ballads often appeared on song sheets and broadsides, including such obscure pieces as " The Thirtieth Street murder."

Occupational ballads tell stories related to particular professions, and are often composed by people in those professions. Cowboy ballads originated in the nineteenth century as entertainment on long cattle drives. They might tell a sad story, as " Sam Bass," here sung by E. A. Briggs in 1939, or they might be entertaining and humorous, as is the ballad of the " Zebra Dun," sung by Frank Goodwyn in 1939. (A "zebra dun" is a light brown horse with a black mane and tail and markings such as stripes on the legs, which suggested wildness to many cowboys.) Coal miners also sing ballads, sometimes used as entertainment on work breaks in the mines, or to recount historical mining events. " The Avondale Mine Disaster," sung by John J. Quinn in 1947, tells the story of the fire at Avondale Colliery near Plymouth, Pennsylvania, United States on September 6, 1869, which took the lives of approximately 110 men and boys. The song is more than a recounting of a tragedy, it is a protest song concerning the safety of mines. Logging also gave rise to ballads, which were sung as entertainment in the camps and shanties where lumberjacks lived. Many ballads unrelated to lumbering were sung by loggers, but a good example of a ballad about the lumberman's life is " Colly's-Run-I-O," sung by L. Parker Temple in 1946. The ballad has versions set in Maine, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Conclusion: The Ballad Continues

The demise of ballads has long been predicted, and this is one reason folksong collectors have avidly sought them out, but old ballads continue to be sung and new songs are still written that hark back to the ballads of earlier times. The folksong revival of the 1940s, and the later revival of the 1950s through the 1970s, led to new interest in narrative songs. Singers such as Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez not only sang old ballads, but wrote some of their own. This movement entered the mainstream in the late 1950s, when singers performed ballads with both acoustic and electric arrangements. Lloyd Price's 1958 recording of the African American ballad "Stagger Lee" was just one version of this song to become a rhythm and blues hit. The Kingston Trio's 1958 recording of the traditional ballad "Tom Dooley" went to number one on the charts and won a Grammy award in the "country and western" category. It was based on this 1940 Library of Congress field recording of Frank Proffitt. On his 1967 album "John Wesley Harding," Bob Dylan intended to invoke ballads of the frontier, while singing narrative songs in his own style. In the 1970s the late Jim Croce was famous for his unique style of urban narrative songs, such as "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and "Rapid Roy," which blended African American and Anglo ballad styles. Ballads continue to be of interest to songwriters such as Paul Simon, who began his career playing traditional ballads such as "Scarborough Fair" and "Barbara Allan," and who has written many narrative songs in his long career, from "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" (1972) to "The Teacher" (2000). Both rap and hip-hop music have drawn heavily on ballad-style storytelling, while modern Mexican and Mexican-American popular songs draw deeply on the corrido tradition. Whether songwriters compose new songs to resemble earlier forms of balladry or cloak their narratives in the styles of current popular music, they compose them for an American public still eager to hear songs that tell stories.

Notes

Resources

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Traditional Ballads | Traditional and Ethnic | Musical Styles | Articles and Essays | The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Introduction Traditional ballads are narrative folksongs - simply put, they are folksongs that tell stories. They tell all kinds of stories, including histories, legends, fairy tales, animal fables, jokes, and tales of outlaws and star-crossed lovers. ("Ballad" is a term also used in the recording industry for slow, romantic songs, but these should not be confused with traditional or folk ballads.)

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Dani of the Seven Wells
mka Dani Zweig
dani@telerama.lm.com

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What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or , which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of Britain and Ireland from the later medieval period until the 19th century. They were widely used across Europe, and later in Australia, North Africa, North America and South America. Ballads are often 13 lines with an ABABBCBC form, consisting of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables. Another common form is ABAB or ABCB repeated, in alternating 8 and 6 syllable lines.

Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century, the term took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and is often used for any love song, particularly the sentimental ballad of pop or rock music, although the term is also associated with the concept of a stylized storytelling song or poem, particularly when used as a title for other media such as a film.

The ballad derives its name from medieval North-East Scottish dance songs or "ballares" ( L: ballare, to dance), from which 'ballet' is also derived, as did the alternative rival form that became the French ballade. As a narrative song, their theme and function may originate from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of storytelling that can be seen in poems such as . Musically they were influenced by the Minnelieder of the Minnesang tradition. The earliest example of a recognizable ballad in form in England is " Judas" in a 13th-century manuscript.

Ballads were originally written to accompany dances, and so were composed in couplets with refrains in alternate lines. These refrains would have been sung by the dancers in time with the dance. Most northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four-line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables. This can be seen in this stanza from " Lord Thomas and Fair Annet":

There is considerable variation on this pattern in almost every respect, including length, number of lines and rhyming scheme, making the strict definition of a ballad extremely difficult. In southern and eastern Europe, and in countries that derive their tradition from them, ballad structure differs significantly, like Spanish romanceros, which are octosyllabic and use consonance rather than rhyme.

Ballads usually are heavily influenced by the regions in which they originate and use the common dialect of the people. Scotland's ballads in particular, both in theme and language, are strongly characterised by their distinctive tradition, even exhibiting some pre-Christian influences in the inclusion of supernatural elements such as travel to the Fairy Kingdom in the Scots ballad "Tam Lin". The ballads do not have any known author or correct version; instead, having been passed down mainly by oral tradition since the Middle Ages, there are many variations of each. The ballads remained an oral tradition until the increased interest in folk songs in the 18th century led collectors such as Bishop Thomas Percy (1729-1811) to publish volumes of popular ballads.

In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self-contained story, often concise, and rely on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic. Themes concerning rural laborers and their sexuality are common, and there are many ballads based on the Robin Hood legend. Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas, as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas.

Scholars of ballads have been divided into "communalists", such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and the Brothers Grimm, who argue that ballads are originally communal compositions, and "individualists" such as Cecil Sharp, who assert that there was one single original author. Communalists tend to see more recent, particularly printed, broadside ballads of known authorship as a debased form of the genre, while individualists see variants as corruptions of an original text. More recently scholars have pointed to the interchange of oral and written forms of the ballad.

The transmission of ballads comprises a key stage in their re-composition. In romantic terms this process is often dramatized as a narrative of degeneration away from the pure 'folk memory' or 'immemorial tradition'. In the introduction to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) the romantic poet and historical novelist Walter Scott argued a need to 'remove obvious corruptions' in order to attempt to restore a supposed original. For Scott, the process of multiple recitations 'incurs the risk of impertinent interpolations from the conceit of one rehearser, unintelligible blunders from the stupidity of another, and omissions equally to be regretted, from the want of memory of a third.' Similarly, John Robert Moore noted 'a natural tendency to oblivescence'.

European Ballads have been generally classified into three major groups: traditional, broadside and literary. In America a distinction is drawn between ballads that are versions of European, particularly British and Irish songs, and 'Native American ballads', developed without reference to earlier songs. A further development was the evolution of the blues ballad, which mixed the genre with Afro-American music. For the late 19th century the music publishing industry found a market for what are often termed sentimental ballads, and these are the origin of the modern use of the term 'ballad' to mean a slow love song.

The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as beginning with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe. From the end of the 15th century there are printed ballads that suggest a rich tradition of popular music. A reference in William Langland's Piers Plowman indicates that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from at least the late 14th century and the oldest detailed material is Wynkyn de Worde's collection of Robin Hood ballads printed about 1495.

Early collections of English ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and in the Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley, (1661-1724), which paralleled the work in Scotland by Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Inspired by his reading as a teenager of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy, Scott began collecting ballads while he attended Edinburgh University in the 1790s. He published his research from 1802 to 1803 in a three-volume work, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Burns collaborated with James Johnson on the multi-volume Scots Musical Museum, a miscellany of folk songs and poetry with original work by Burns. Around the same time, he worked with George Thompson on A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

Both Northern English and Southern Scots shared in the identified tradition of Border ballads, particularly evinced by the cross-border narrative in versions of " The Ballad of Chevy Chase" sometimes associated with the Lancashire-born sixteenth-century minstrel Richard Sheale.

It has been suggested that the increasing interest in traditional popular ballads during the eighteenth century was prompted by social issues such as the enclosure movement as many of the ballads deal with themes concerning rural laborers. James Davey has suggested that the common themes of sailing and naval battles may also have prompted the use (at least in England) of popular ballads as naval recruitment tools.

Key work on the traditional ballad was undertaken in the late 19th century in Denmark by Svend Grundtvig and for England and Scotland by the Harvard professor Francis James Child. They attempted to record and classify all the known ballads and variants in their chosen regions. Since Child died before writing a commentary on his work it is uncertain exactly how and why he differentiated the 305 ballads printed that would be published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. There have been many different and contradictory attempts to classify traditional ballads by theme, but commonly identified types are the religious, supernatural, tragic, love ballads, historic, legendary and humorous. The traditional form and content of the ballad were modified to form the basis for twenty-three bawdy pornographic ballads that appeared in the underground Victorian magazine , which ran for eighteen issues between 1879 and 1880. Unlike the traditional ballad, these obscene ballads aggressively mocked sentimental nostalgia and local lore.

Broadside ballads (also known as 'broadsheet', 'stall', 'vulgar' or 'come all ye' ballads) were a product of the development of cheap print in the 16th century. They were generally printed on one side of a medium to large sheet of poor quality paper. In the first half of the 17th century, they were printed in black-letter or gothic type and included multiple, eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune title, as well as an alluring poem. By the 18th century, they were printed in white letter or roman type and often without much decoration (as well as tune title). These later sheets could include many individual songs, which would be cut apart and sold individually as "slip songs." Alternatively, they might be folded to make small cheap books or "chapbooks" which often drew on ballad stories. They were produced in huge numbers, with over 400,000 being sold in England annually by the 1660s. Tessa Watt estimates the number of copies sold may have been in the millions. Many were sold by travelling chapmen in city streets or at fairs. The subject matter varied from what has been defined as the traditional ballad, although many traditional ballads were printed as broadsides. Among the topics were love, marriage, religion, drinking-songs, legends, and early journalism, which included disasters, political events and signs, wonders and prodigies.

Literary or lyrical ballads grew out of an increasing interest in the ballad form among social elites and intellectuals, particularly in the Romantic movement from the later 18th century. Respected literary figures Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland collected and wrote their own ballads. Similarly in England William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced a collection of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that included Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats were attracted to the simple and natural style of these folk ballads and tried to imitate it. At the same time in Germany Goethe cooperated with Schiller on a series of ballads, some of which were later set to music by Schubert. Later important examples of the poetic form included Rudyard Kipling's " Barrack-Room Ballads" (1892-6) and Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897).

In the 18th century ballad operas developed as a form of English stage entertainment, partly in opposition to the Italian domination of the London operatic scene. It consisted of racy and often satirical spoken (English) dialogue, interspersed with songs that are deliberately kept very short to minimize disruptions to the flow of the story. Rather than the more aristocratic themes and music of the Italian opera, the ballad operas were set to the music of popular folk songs and dealt with lower-class characters. Subject matter involved the lower, often criminal, orders, and typically showed a suspension (or inversion) of the high moral values of the Italian opera of the period.

The first, most important and successful was The Beggar's Opera of 1728, with a libretto by John Gay and music arranged by John Christopher Pepusch, both of whom probably influenced by Parisian vaudeville and the burlesques and musical plays of Thomas d'Urfey (1653-1723), a number of whose collected ballads they used in their work. Gay produced further works in this style, including a sequel under the title Polly. Henry Fielding, Colley Cibber, Arne, Dibdin, Arnold, Shield, Jackson of Exeter, Hook and many others produced ballad operas that enjoyed great popularity. Ballad opera was attempted in America and Prussia. Later it moved into a more pastoral form, like Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love in a Village (1763) and Shield's Rosina (1781), using more original music that imitated, rather than reproduced, existing ballads. Although the form declined in popularity towards the end of the 18th century its influence can be seen in light operas like that of Gilbert and Sullivan's early works like The Sorcerer as well as in the modern musical.

In the 20th century, one of the most influential plays, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's (1928) The Threepenny Opera was a reworking of The Beggar's Opera, setting a similar story with the same characters, and containing much of the same satirical bite, but only using one tune from the original. The term ballad opera has also been used to describe musicals using folk music, such as The Martins and the Coys in 1944, and Peter Bellamy's The Transports in 1977. The satiric elements of ballad opera can be seen in some modern musicals such as and .

Some 300 ballads sung in North America have been identified as having origins in British traditional or broadside ballads. Examples include ' The Streets of Laredo', which was found in Britain and Ireland as 'The Unfortunate Rake'; however, a further 400 have been identified as originating in America, including among the best known, ' The Ballad of Davy Crockett' and ' Jesse James'. They became an increasing area of interest for scholars in the 19th century and most were recorded or catalogued by George Malcolm Laws, although some have since been found to have British origins and additional songs have since been collected. They are usually considered closest in form to British broadside ballads and in terms of style are largely indistinguishable, however, they demonstrate a particular concern with occupations, journalistic style and often lack the ribaldry of British broadside ballads.

The blues ballad has been seen as a fusion of Anglo-American and Afro-American styles of music from the 19th century. Blues ballads tend to deal with active protagonists, often anti-heroes, resisting adversity and authority, but frequently lacking a strong narrative and emphasising character instead. They were often accompanied by banjo and guitar which followed the blues musical format. The most famous blues ballads include those about John Henry and Casey Jones.

The ballad was taken to Australia by early settlers from Britain and Ireland and gained particular foothold in the rural outback. The rhyming songs, poems and tales written in the form of ballads often relate to the itinerant and rebellious spirit of Australia in The Bush, and the authors and performers are often referred to as bush bards. The 19th century was the golden age of bush ballads. Several collectors have catalogued the songs including John Meredith whose recording in the 1950s became the basis of the collection in the National Library of Australia. The songs tell personal stories of life in the wide open country of Australia. Typical subjects include mining, raising and droving cattle, sheep shearing, wanderings, war stories, the 1891 Australian shearers' strike, class conflicts between the landless working class and the squatters (landowners), and outlaws such as Ned Kelly, as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking. The most famous bush ballad is " Waltzing Matilda", which has been called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia".

Sentimental ballads, sometimes called "tear-jerkers" or "drawing-room ballads" owing to their popularity with the middle classes, had their origins in the early " Tin Pan Alley" music industry of the later 19th century. They were generally sentimental, narrative, strophic songs published separately or as part of an opera (descendants perhaps of broadside ballads, but with printed music, and usually newly composed). Such songs include "Little Rosewood Casket" (1870), " After the Ball" (1892) and " Danny Boy". The association with sentimentality led to the term "ballad" being used for slow love songs from the 1950s onwards. Modern variations include " jazz ballads", " pop ballads", " rock ballads", " R&B ballads" and " power ballads".

1. ^ J. E. Housman, British Popular Ballads (1952, London: Ayer Publishing, 1969), p. 15.

2. ^ A. N. Bold, The Ballad (Routledge, 1979), p. 5.

3. "Popular Ballads", The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, p. 610.

4. D. Head and I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 66.

5. T. A. Green, ^ Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 81.

6. ^ "Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth-Century Britain | Reviews in History". www.history.ac.uk.

7. ^ T. A. Green, Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 353.

8. B. Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 45.

9. ^ Gregory, E. David (April 13, 2006). Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820-1883. Scarecrow Press. pp. 42-43. ISBN 978-1-4616-7417-7.

10. E. Nebeker, ^ "The Heyday of the Broadside Ballad", English Broadside Ballad Archive, University of California-Santa Barbara, retrieved 15 August 2011.

11. ^ N. Cohen, Folk Music: a Regional Exploration (Greenwood, 2005), pp. 14-29.

12. Kerry O'Brien December 10, 2003 7:30 Report, abc.net.au Archived 2010-01-10 at the Wayback Machine

13. ^ Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?", The National Library of Australia, retrieved 14 March 2008.

Dugaw, Dianne. Deep Play: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Print.

Middleton, Richard (13 January 2015) [2001]. "Popular Music (I)". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Randel, Don (1986). The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-61525-5.

Temperley, Nicholas (25 July 2013) [2001]. "Ballad (from Lat. ballare: 'to dance')". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Winton, Calhoun. John Gay and the London Theatre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Print.

Witmer, Robert (14 October 2011) [20 January 2002]. "Ballad (jazz)". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Marcello Sorce Keller, "Sul castel di mirabel: Life of a Ballad in Oral Tradition and Choral Practice", Ethnomusicology, XXX(1986), no. 3, 449- 469.

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A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or , which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of Britain and Ireland from the later medieval period until the 19th century.

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Introduction

Traditional ballads are narrative folksongs - simply put, they are folksongs that tell stories. They tell all kinds of stories, including histories, legends, fairy tales, animal fables, jokes, and tales of outlaws and star-crossed lovers. ("Ballad" is a term also used in the recording industry for slow, romantic songs, but these should not be confused with traditional or folk ballads.) Many traditional ballads came to North America with settlers from Europe. Others were composed in North America and tell stories or relate ideas that tell us about the attitudes and experiences of our nation as it developed.

Playlist

Five recordings from Library of Congress collections

The Last Fierce Charge
Sung by Warde Ford. This Civil War ballad in which both protagonists die was used as a plea for peace during the war.

Milwaukee fire
Sung by Robert Walker. Walker was the uncle of ballad singers Warde, Pat, and Bogue Ford. They are an example of a family that handed down American, British, and Irish ballads, singing them in a traditional unembellished style.

Whaling song
An occupational ballad sung by James H. Gibbs, who learned it as a boy on Nantucket, and who also spent time working as a whaler in his youth.

Sung by Woody Guthrie in 1941. This is an example of a British ballad brought to the United States by settlers and documented by James Francis Child.

Lament of the Old Sourdough
A ballad of the Nome, Alaska, gold rush of 1899-1909, sung by Paul Roseland in 1975. Lyrics by Sam C. Dunham, 1901.

Some older ballads derive from songs composed by traveling minstrels who made their living through song in the houses of noblemen. Minstrels composed narrative songs describing love stories, historical battles and events, legends, and journeys to far off lands. As these songs were intended as entertainment, they had meters and melodies appropriate for dancing and were often sung with musical accompaniment. Early ballads, which in English date to before 1600, may also be derived from other medieval sources, including metrical romances, folk tales, and apocryphal gospels about the life of Jesus. Some early ballads from this tradition traveled to North America with the first European settlers. Margaret MacArthur, a folklorist and singer, performed some examples of the earliest known ballads brought to North America in her concert at the Library of Congress in 2005.

"King John and the Bishop of Canterbury," tells a story about King John of England, who ruled from 1199 until 1216. Similarly, " The Death of Queen Jane," sung for the Library's Archive of Folk Song by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1949, recounts the story of the birth of King Edward VI of England, and the death in childbirth of his mother, Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII. Such historical ballads are often assumed to have been composed not long after the events they describe, although usually this is difficult to prove. " Mr. Frog," a folktale ballad about a frog who marries a mouse, which was sung for the Library of Congress by Pearl Nye, derives from a ballad that was first mentioned in 1548, and for which a full text survives from 1611.

The earliest ballads were often composed for the entertainment of the wealthy, but as printing became available, they were spread through printed lyrics, inexpensively published on one side of a piece of paper. Such a sheet was called a broadside or song sheet. Song sheets contained both lyric songs and ballads and were often sold by street vendors at cheap prices. Typically, such sheets contained only the words to the song, with no musical notation. Sometimes, the name of the intended melody was given, and the buyer was assumed to know the tune already. Vendors were frequently also singers who could demonstrate the proper melody to a buyer. Finally, purchasers of broadsides were also free to compose their own tunes, or to fit the song to any existing melody. In this way, the same ballad text often entered the oral tradition with many different tunes attached. The most common singing style was a cappella, perhaps because ordinary people had limited access to musical instruments.

By the late nineteenth century, scholars had begun studying the ballad tradition, both in Britain and America. Harvard Scholar Francis James Child collected early ballads from manuscript sources, and attempted to identify the earliest versions. His collection and documentation's final form was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. In this influential book, published in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898, Child created a system of numbers for the ballads he collected, which some scholars still use today as an indexing tool. For more on this, see the essay, " Francis James Child and The English and Scottish Popular Ballads."

Detail from Battle of Lake Erie. Percy Moran, 1911. Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6893. Ballads that describe historic events, such as "Perry's Victory," can give us insights into how they were viewed or debated by people at the time.

Ballads and Epics

The oldest narrative songs were epics, poems about historical events and legends, some of which are ancient. Epics are typically too long to remember word-for-word, and therefore are composed in performance through a process that involves inserting verbal formulas into a traditional structural framework. They are often chanted, and many of them take days to perform. They are commonly sung without instrumentation or with a simple accompaniment such as a stringed instrument. John Soininen, in this field recording from 1939, provides an excerpt from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, " Vaka vanha Vainamoinen." Another example is an excerpt from the Croatian Epic of Kosovo, sung in Serbo-Croatian by Peter Boro, who accompanies himself on a stringed instrument called a gusle. The melodies in these songs are very simple, as the focus for the listener was intended to be on the telling of the tale, while the chanting and rhymed lines help the singer to remember the verses.

Unlike epics, ballads are typically remembered word-for-word and sung to fully developed melodies. They became distinct from epics and acquired the features we recognize today during the Middle Ages. The word "ballad" is derived from a Latin root meaning "dance," which has led to the theory that early ballads were used for dancing. Some support for this theory comes from the fact that ballads are sung for dancing in some parts of Europe today, but how old and widespread a tradition this is has never been established with certainty.

Detail from Broadside of Revolutionary War period: Tea Destroyed by Indians. ca. 1773. Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-53319 "Broadsides" or "song sheets" such as this were an inexpensive way to market the lyrics to songs, used extensively in the Americas beginning in the Colonial period. This example celebrates the Boston Tea Party.

Broadside Ballads

Alongside the older traditional ballads they helped to spread, printing companies also composed new ballads, frequently employing poets for this purpose. In addition to providing entertainment, such new ballads became a means of spreading news, gossip, and political commentary of the day. Ballads composed for the cheap print market are seen by scholars as a separate class of ballads from the earlier ballad tradition, and are usually referred to as "broadside ballads." The subject matter of these ballads often concerns the lives of common people. They can be reminiscent of stories in the tabloid press today, intending to persuade, shock, or amaze with tales of murders, disasters, and extraordinary events. A broadside ballad frequently known as "The Wild and Wicked Youth" in Britain and Ireland, which tells the story of a young man who becomes a thief to support his wife, and who is caught and executed for his crime, became a widespread folksong in the United States under the title " The Roving Boy." It was sung for the Library of Congress by Justus Begley of Hazard, Kentucky, in 1937.

European Ballads in America

Ballads as sung in North America, while preserving many qualities of the songs as they were sung in Britain and Ireland, also introduced changes through the process of transmission from one singer to another. In some cases the British ballads were made more American as the singers recalled them. For example, Mary Sullivan sings a ballad known in England as "Young Beichan," or "Lord Bateman," which she learned as " Lloyd Bateman" Since the United States does not recognize aristocratic titles, she calls the protagonist a "gentleman" rather than a Lord. In early English versions of this ballad, the young protagonist sets sail from England for the Middle East, where he is captured and held captive for ransom. In Sullivan's version, Bateman sets sail for Turkey from the coast of Georgia in the United States. The version of " The Farmer's Curst Wife" performed by Asa Davis of Vermont strongly reflects the singer's Irish background. A more American-sounding version, with the alternate title " Reason Why That Women Is Wiser Than Men," sung by Lum Wilson "Bill" Jackson of California, shows that the ballad became more thoroughly American in some locations.

Ballads from many countries and languages have arrived in North America with immigrants. Listen to the Finnish murder ballad " Velisurmaaja" sung by John Soininen and notice the melodic qualities that are absent from the example performed by the same singer from the epic, the Kalevala, mentioned above. An outlaw ballad, "Utott-kopott oreg csarda" (The Old Tavern), sung by Mary Gaidos of California, demonstrates the style of ballad brought to the United States by immigrants from Hungary. Welsh coal miners brought the ballad " The Miner's Doom," which was then picked up and sung by many American coal miners, including Daniel Walsh of Pennsylvania, who sang this version.

Eastern European ballads often show a relationship with the epic tradition. For example, old Russian ballads such as " Alaskan Promyshlenniki," performed by John Panamarkoff, is chanted, like an epic, rather than sung. The recording is an excerpt from a long ballad about settlers traveling to Alaska in 1808. " Mogatz Mirza," an Armenian outlaw ballad sung by Ruben J. Baboyan in California in 1939, still uses a simple melody, but allows the singer more opportunities to show off his voice and give emotional expression to the story than in the Russian example.

Some ballads traveled from country to country, translated along the way by polyglot singers. " Six ans sur mer" (Six Years at Sea), sung by Elita, Mary, and Ella Hoffpauir of New Iberia, Louisiana, is a ballad with a widespread international distribution. It is known in Britain, Spain, Scandinavia, and other areas, but is best known in France, where the Hoffpauirs' version surely originated. It concerns a ship lost at sea, in which the sailors are forced to draw lots to see which of them will be eaten; after the decision is made but before it is implemented, they are rescued.

Native American Ballads

Ballads composed in the United States and passed along in tradition tell stories and legends on many topics. While retaining recognizable European roots, they developed in ways that reflect the regional differences in songs of the United States. One of the earliest known ballads composed in the American colonies is "Springfield Mountain," a song about the death by snakebite of Timothy Merrick in Wilbraham, Massachusetts in 1761. The tale was particularly tragic because Merrick was very young, and also because he was to be married the following day. Two versions of this ballad were written down in the nineteenth century, and an account of the events leading to Merrick's death was published in 1914. Detailed information such as this is unusual for songs in oral tradition and helps historians to date the beginnings of what are called "native" American ballads, that is, those composed in North America. As often happens when songs are transmitted orally, this tragic ballad changed and became more lyric, as in this example called " Young Johnny," sung by Winifred Bundy in 1941.

As colonial printers set up their shops in the 1700s, sheets containing song lyrics were printed and marketed in North America. These included British and Irish ballads along with ballads composed in North America. During the American Revolutionary War, ballads about battles and heroes were used to build support among the colonists. An example is a song sheet with the ballad "Britania's Disgrace," and a lyric song, "Lamentation of Lady Washington." [2] "Britania's Disgrace" is a song about the battles to secure strategic ports in New York and New Jersey. Though undated by the publisher, the lyrics of the ballad relate events that took place between 1775 and 1777.

Such historical ballads also entered oral tradition, where they were passed on by word of mouth until modern times. " The Bombardment of Bristol," here sung by Sam Hinton, tells of the bombing of Bristol, Rhode Island by a British ship during the American Revolution in 1775. (Bristol was bombed again in 1778.) Though of unknown age, the ballad has a style consistent with it being from the era of the war. Though the town was severely damaged, the song seems to make light of the event. This reflected a "Yankee" attitude of the time that often portrayed the British forces as inept, though Britain was one of the great military powers of the age. Similarly, the U.S. Navy's early victories in the War of 1812 were cast as a humiliating defeat for England by American ballad-writers, as Pearl Nye's version of " Perry's Victory" makes clear. Perhaps it was songs like this that helped American soldiers face the coming battles.

Some ballads seem to have been composed to promote a particular point of view about an historical event. For example, " Custer's Last Charge," sung by Warde Ford, is about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which was a conflict between the United States Army Seventh Cavalry Regiment and a much larger confederation of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The song depicts Commander George Armstrong Custer and the 267 men who died with him as a martyrs and heroes. Because Custer used poor judgment in planning his attack, and because the American Indian tribes were defending lands that they had been given by the United States by treaty, historians today do not view Custer's actions as heroic. But the ballad preserves the attitude of a particular era, which painted the American Indians as the enemy regardless of their treaty rights, a situation worth reflecting upon.

" The Cumberland's Crew," sung by Pearl Nye, and " The Iron Merrimac," sung by Judge Learned Hand, are examples of ballads that offer a biased perspective on historical events. Both concern the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8-9, 1862, during the Civil War. (Hampton Roads is a strategic shipping lane at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, off the shore of Virginia.) "The Cumberland's Crew" tells of conflict between the sloop USS Cumberland and the ironclad Confederate ship CSS Virginia, which had been constructed out of the hull of a raised Union ship, the USS Merrimack (also spelled "Merrimac"). The wooden USS Cumberland was rammed and sunk by the ironclad in a devastating show of the power of this new type of warship. But rather than focusing on the defeat, the ballad extols the heroism and patriotism of the sailors in the USS Cumberland. The second day of the battle pitched two ironclads against each other for the first time in history, as the Union's USS Monitor arrived and took on the CSS Virginia (remembered both in song and in news reports of the day as "the Merrimack"). Although this battle of the ironclads is generally regarded as a draw by historians, the ballad "Iron Merrimac," promotes the view of the Union proponents that the battle was a Union victory.

French-American and Spanish-American Ballads

Ballads in the French and Spanish languages, both brought from abroad and composed in America, have a long history in the United States, since large portions of the country were settled by French and Spanish colonists before they became part of the United States or experienced significant Anglophone influence. Marce Lacouture, David Greely, and Kristi Guillory performed French songs of Louisiana at a concert at the Library of Congress in 2010. They learned the second song they perform, "Belle," from a 1934 Library of Congress field recording, of a singer known only as Mr. Bornu. It is a ballad composed in Louisiana, about a man who travels from Louisiana to Texas only to learn his sweetheart has fallen ill back home. He returns to Louisiana and sells his horse Henry to pay for her treatment. (The song occurs at 7:45 of the webcast.) "Isabeau s'y promène," sung by Lacouture and Greely (at 25:00 of the webcast), is a North American version of an old French ballad about a sailor who drowns trying to retrieve a gold ring lost by the girl he is courting. This version is one that Lacouture learned from a ballad singer in New Orleans, Louisiana. The classically trained Canadian singer Eva Gauthier made a commercial recording of the same ballad as an art song, demonstrating that French songs are distributed throughout North America, and also providing a sense of how traditional ballads can be adapted for different musical styles.

Spanish language ballads from Mexico and from states that were once part of Mexico describe the Spanish settlement of North America and the events leading to the formation of modern Mexico. Corridos, as these songs are called in Spanish, were used for dancing and entertainment, and influenced the development of song styles in the West. José Suarez was a blind singer in Brownsville, Texas, who memorized and performed many corridos. Field recordings of some of his repertoire were made by John and Ruby Lomax in 1939 and are available in this presentation. " Corrido villésta de la toma de Matamoros," is a song from the Mexican Revolution describing the siege of Matamoros, which is across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, in 1913. This violent event caused Mexican townspeople to flee over the border, thus affecting both countries. " Diecinueve de enero," also called "El Corrido de José Mosqueda" is another corrido from the Mexico-U.S. border. It describes the robbery of a derailed train by a bandit, José Mosqueda, who is credited in the ballad with having caused the train wreck. (The historical facts are not clear.) The outlaws gave their ill-gotten gains to townspeople, probably to evade the law, leading to the gang being treated as heroes, in a legend similar to that of Robin Hood.

Jesse James. c1882. Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-3854. The killing of this outlaw on April 3,1882 became the subject of a ballad.

Ballad Themes: Heroes, Outlaws, Murderers, and Workers

Ballads that originated in the United States often celebrate heroic Americans. " Casey Jones," relates the tragic death of train engineer Luther "Casey" Jones when his train, the Cannonball Express, collided with a stalled freight train in Vaughn, Mississippi in the early hours of April 30, 1900. Jones was the only fatality in the crash, having told his fireman, Simeon T. Webb, to jump before the impact. The ballad created a legend of an engineer who gave his life for the passengers and crew. Some versions name "Vanderbilt's daughter" as a passenger saved by Jones, which is an embellishment to add to his heroism. Some of the historical facts of the crash are disputed, as the Illinois Railroad investigation found that Jones had missed a flagman and held him responsible for the accident, while, for the rest of his life, Simeon Webb testified that no flagman could be seen.

"John Henry," a similar hero ballad from the African American tradition, tells the story of a "steel driver," that is, a worker who drills holes in rocks for dynamite in order to blast a railway tunnel. In the song John Henry pits himself against a steam-powered drilling machine and wins, but dies in the effort. Though many suspect this legend to have its origins in fact, the historical John Henry remains elusive. The enduring appeal of the song is in its depiction of the American worker as heroic and in its valuing humans refusing to bow in the face of industrial progress. It has been particularly important in depicting a heroic black working man devoted to both his job and his family. In general, African American ballads often describe attributes of the ballad's hero, merely alluding to the details of his story, and many versions of "John Henry" follow this pattern. For more on " John Henry," including several sound recordings, see the article about this song.

On the other hand, some ballads celebrated anti-heroes, especially outlaws and criminals. Historically outlaws were sometimes romanticized in the press and popular stories as well as in songs. Ruthless criminals might be treated as "Robin Hoods." Jesse James was a leader of a gang that committed violent robberies of banks and trains in several states in the aftermath of the Civil War. The gang was pursued aggressively by authorities and by 1880 several members of the gang had been captured or killed. James went back to his home state of Missouri, hired brothers Charley and Robert Ford both to assist in robberies and to live in his home as protection for himself and his family. The Ford brothers decided to seek the bounty offered for James, so Robert Ford shot him in his own home. The ballad " Jesse James," here sung by E. A. Briggs, is about betrayal, focusing on James' murder by a trusted friend. A widely distributed ballad, it helped create a folk hero out of an outlaw. On the other hand, " The James and Younger Boys," sung by O.C. "Cotton" Davis in 1941, is told from the point of view of James's accomplice Cole Younger. It presents a more realistic picture of outlawry, and expresses regret for the gang's crimes. As with hero ballads, African Americans had their own outlaw ballads, often known as "bad man ballads," which described, often with ambivalent feelings, violent crimes in defiance of white authority. " Bad Man Ballad," (perhaps titled by the collector) was sung for John Lomax by Willie Rayford in 1939.

Murder was another frequent topic of American ballads. Some murder ballads were based on British originals, such as " Pretty Polly," which was sung for the Library of Congress by Pete Steele of Hamilton, Ohio, in 1938. This song derives from an English ballad known as "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter." But many other murder ballads were composed in America, especially after famous murder cases. An example is " Pearl Bryant," a fictionalized account of the murder of Pearl Bryan in Kentucky in 1896. Murder ballads often appeared on song sheets and broadsides, including such obscure pieces as " The Thirtieth Street murder."

Occupational ballads tell stories related to particular professions, and are often composed by people in those professions. Cowboy ballads originated in the nineteenth century as entertainment on long cattle drives. They might tell a sad story, as " Sam Bass," here sung by E. A. Briggs in 1939, or they might be entertaining and humorous, as is the ballad of the " Zebra Dun," sung by Frank Goodwyn in 1939. (A "zebra dun" is a light brown horse with a black mane and tail and markings such as stripes on the legs, which suggested wildness to many cowboys.) Coal miners also sing ballads, sometimes used as entertainment on work breaks in the mines, or to recount historical mining events. " The Avondale Mine Disaster," sung by John J. Quinn in 1947, tells the story of the fire at Avondale Colliery near Plymouth, Pennsylvania, United States on September 6, 1869, which took the lives of approximately 110 men and boys. The song is more than a recounting of a tragedy, it is a protest song concerning the safety of mines. Logging also gave rise to ballads, which were sung as entertainment in the camps and shanties where lumberjacks lived. Many ballads unrelated to lumbering were sung by loggers, but a good example of a ballad about the lumberman's life is " Colly's-Run-I-O," sung by L. Parker Temple in 1946. The ballad has versions set in Maine, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Conclusion: The Ballad Continues

The demise of ballads has long been predicted, and this is one reason folksong collectors have avidly sought them out, but old ballads continue to be sung and new songs are still written that hark back to the ballads of earlier times. The folksong revival of the 1940s, and the later revival of the 1950s through the 1970s, led to new interest in narrative songs. Singers such as Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez not only sang old ballads, but wrote some of their own. This movement entered the mainstream in the late 1950s, when singers performed ballads with both acoustic and electric arrangements. Lloyd Price's 1958 recording of the African American ballad "Stagger Lee" was just one version of this song to become a rhythm and blues hit. The Kingston Trio's 1958 recording of the traditional ballad "Tom Dooley" went to number one on the charts and won a Grammy award in the "country and western" category. It was based on this 1940 Library of Congress field recording of Frank Proffitt. On his 1967 album "John Wesley Harding," Bob Dylan intended to invoke ballads of the frontier, while singing narrative songs in his own style. In the 1970s the late Jim Croce was famous for his unique style of urban narrative songs, such as "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and "Rapid Roy," which blended African American and Anglo ballad styles. Ballads continue to be of interest to songwriters such as Paul Simon, who began his career playing traditional ballads such as "Scarborough Fair" and "Barbara Allan," and who has written many narrative songs in his long career, from "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" (1972) to "The Teacher" (2000). Both rap and hip-hop music have drawn heavily on ballad-style storytelling, while modern Mexican and Mexican-American popular songs draw deeply on the corrido tradition. Whether songwriters compose new songs to resemble earlier forms of balladry or cloak their narratives in the styles of current popular music, they compose them for an American public still eager to hear songs that tell stories.

Notes

Resources

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Traditional Ballads | Traditional and Ethnic | Musical Styles | Articles and Essays | The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Introduction Traditional ballads are narrative folksongs - simply put, they are folksongs that tell stories. They tell all kinds of stories, including histories, legends, fairy tales, animal fables, jokes, and tales of outlaws and star-crossed lovers. ("Ballad" is a term also used in the recording industry for slow, romantic songs, but these should not be confused with traditional or folk ballads.)

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What makes a poem sound pleasing to the ear? A solid rhythm for one thing-something we know a good song also depends on. There are two poetic forms that began as song forms: the ballad stanza of British and American literature and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

Ballads in Poetry

Ballads, or "story songs," have been around for centuries. Many of the best loved were sung first in the Middle Ages, and the tradition continues in modern songs. Ballad lyrics have a unique structure and rhythm. The traditional ballad stanza has four lines called a quatrain. The first and third lines have eight syllables; the second and fourth, the rhyming lines, have six. What we count, however, is the rhythm of the lines themselves, the beat. Most verse in ballad form is iambic. An iamb is a metrical foot in which a weak syllable precedes a stressed syllable, sounding like a heartbeat ( bum BUM). The first and third lines of a ballad stanza have four stressed beats, and the second and fourth have three. The rhythm is clear when the lyrics of the traditional ballad "The Unquiet Grave" are written with the stressed syllables in capital letters:

the WIND / doth BLOW / toDAY / my LOVE
a FEW / small DROPS / of RAIN
i've NEV / er HAD / but ONE / true LOVE,
in COLD / grave SHE / was LAIN

You can follow the ballad rhythm in the first two song samples on the right.

The ballad's structure-four stressed beats (iambic tetrameter) followed by three stressed beats (iambic triameter)-is well suited to tell a dramatic story in simple terms. The short line makes a point, concludes a thought, or provides a punch line, and we move on. Poets in the late 18th and early 19th centuries found the ballad form easily translated to written works. They used the stanza to create narrative poems with stirring and dramatic effects. The rhythms of the ballad stanza can be heard in the poems of Rudyard Kipling and John Keats. Though the number of syllables may vary, the ballad rhythm remains firm.

Blues in Poetry

Another recognizable song structure in popular music is the African American blues stanza. The intention of the lyrics is to express an emotion. The blues rhythm originated in African American field hollers and work songs, and some trace it to centuries-old songs by griots of West Africa. Here is a stanza from Lead Belly's "Good Morning Blues":

Good morning blues. How do you do?
Good morning blues. How do you do?
I'm doing all right. Good morning. How are you?

There are generally three lines in the blues stanza-the second line repeats the first, and the third line brings home the rhyme. The lyrics are usually set to twelve bars of music in 4/4 time. While the lyrics of the blues are rarely in a structured meter like the ballad stanza, the music often has a driving beat that is not unlike the heartbeat rhythm of the iamb: bum Bum, bum Bum, bum Bum, bum Bum.

The first to recognize the potential of the blues as written poetry was Langston Hughes, who was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. When he was eleven years old, he heard the blues coming from an orchestra of blind musicians on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. Hughes moved to the East Coast in 1921 and heard the music again, in clubs on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York, and 7th Street in Washington, D.C. "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on 7th Street," he remembered in his autobiography The Big Sea. Those songs "had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." The blues stanza allowed Hughes to convey the African American experience in people's own vernacular language.

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Music in Poetry: Ballad and Blues Stanzas | Smithsonian Folkways

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What makes a poem sound pleasing to the ear? A solid rhythm for one thing-something we know a good song also depends on. There are two poetic forms that began as song forms: the ballad stanza of British and American literature and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

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Organize anything, together. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, know what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.

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I'm completely prepared and excited to perform! 

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.poll_choices[].choice_text
I'm done with the research, but could use some extra prep time.

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Let's name some of the ballad characteristics we recognized from the performances:

Example

Example

Example

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Hey Joe - Billy Roberts (Lyrics and Chords)

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ARTIST: Billy Roberts TITLE: Hey Joe Lyrics and Chords [As recorded by Jimi Hendrix] Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand Hey Joe, I said where ya goin' with that gun in your hand / C G D A E EE7 E - / : I'm

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Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

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Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

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Dudley Randall was an African-American poet and poetry publisher from Detroit, Michigan. He founded a pioneering publishing company called Broadside Press in 1965, which published many leading African-American writers, among them Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and others. Randal…

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What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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Let's compare and contrast Medieval and modern Ballads.

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Login to access and create your next design.

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Song Maker, an experiment in Chrome Music Lab, is a simple way for anyone to make and share a song.

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Login to access and create your next design.

# data[].attributes.headline
What are some characteristics of Ballads?

# data[].attributes.subject
What are some characteristics of Ballads?

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Organize anything, together. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, know what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.poll_choices[].choice_text
I'm completely prepared and excited to present! 

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.poll_choices[].choice_text
I'm done with the project, but could use some extra practice.