Ballad

A ballad is a rhythmic poem that originated as part of the European oral tradition during the late Middle Ages. Most ballads are put to music and sung although a literary type also exists. Its form, or structure, includes a story, often with repetitive lines, that is set in quatrains and usually uses an abab rhyme scheme or, alternately, abcb. The term originated in French as balade, but the first version to be called ballad in England was the printed broadsheet, which appeared in the early eighteenth century. The broadsheets revived the popularity of the early folk narratives, which people began to call ballads, too.

Modern-day ballads are usually slow, romantic love songs or so-called power ballads, which employ strong emotions as the singers tell their stories.

Overview

Several types of ballads from various time periods and perspectives began in the oral tradition of medieval Europe and continue into the pop culture of today. The main forms of the ballad are traditional, broadside, and literary. However, because the guidelines are imprecise, even scholars have difficulty pinpointing specific elements that are required for a poem or song to be considered a ballad. Many prefer to define by example, comparing a specimen to the Francis James Child collection of traditional ballads as rationale.

In spite of their "I know it when I see it" definition, all ballads are narrative poems that follow a predictable form and rhyme. Stanzas run four lines, use a set rhyme scheme, and often have repetitive words or lines. English ballads such as "Barbry Allen" and "Hangman Hangman" were part of the folk tradition or "pop culture" of the day. The early songs were changed at will by those who sang them; so many versions of the songs exist that their origins have been lost. The tunes to which they were sung offer no clues, since early ballads were simply set to one of the traditional melodies of the day.

Traditional Ballads

Traditional ballads began in the oral tradition, telling a story in poetic form similar to folktales and legends. The theme was usually love, and most ballads included a repeated refrain and were sung to one of several standard tunes. "Chevy Chase," "The Elfin Knights," and "The Demon Lover" are examples of traditional ballads.

Broadsides

Beginning in the sixteenth century, printers hired performers to sing their ballads while hawking copies of the lyrics at fairs, theaters, markets, and taverns. Critics of the era scorned the broadsides, often called street ballads, saying they lacked literary qualities and offered only rough forms, coarse language, and dubious topics. Modern readers, however, compared them to popular songs of the twentieth century and found them quite poetic, especially considering that they were cranked out one after another as a source of income. In fact, broadsides chronicled the lives of low- and middle-class people, rather than the gentry, who favored literary poetry. The earthy, colloquial street ballads more closely resembled the accessible songs of Bob Dylan than the complex and difficult poems of Wallace Stevens. Regardless of whether they were true poetry or merely Elizabethan pop music, broadsides reflected the world in which the writers lived. "Greensleeves," first published in 1584 in a collection called A Handefull of Pleaseant Delites, is one example of a broadside ballad that is still enjoyed today.

Literary Ballads

While the writers of traditional ballads remain anonymous, the authors of literary ballads created poems for an educated audience with a certain degree of sophistication. They were not meant to be sung, even though they deliberately imitated traditional ballads in several ways. The form, subject matter, style, and tone all were copied from traditional ballads, and some even retell the original stories. The difference is that the sentiments expressed in literary ballads are those of purposeful individual poets while traditional ballads are the anonymous expression of a people through their folk traditions. Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and John Keats wrote ballads on traditional topics such as tragic love, mystical beings, and epic journeys. Narratives such as "The Charge of the Light Brigade," by Alfred Lord Tennyson; "Sister Helen," by Christina Rossetti; and "The Ballad of Father Gilligan," by William Butler Yeats are examples of literary ballads. Modern poets who have written in the ballad form include W.H. Auden, Bertolt Brecht, and Elizabeth Bishop.

The Child Ballads

The Child ballads are a definitive collection of traditional folk songs from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Scotland. Francis James Child, a Harvard professor and folklorist, spent years collecting the lyrics to 305 songs for his book The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in ten volumes from 1882 to 1898. This collection contains numerous versions of each song, as well as his inferences and remarks. For example, in researching "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight," an early ballad with many English variations, he found 85 sources citing similar songs in seventeen languages, including Dutch, Polish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and several Scandinavian languages. Child's intent was to make accurate information available to scholars, but after musicians discovered the collection, the book became a source of material for singers, leading to a folk revival that began in the 1950s.

Many ballads traveled to the United States with early immigrants from England and Scotland. In the first part of the twentieth century, English folklore scholar Cecil J. Sharp visited mountain dwellers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia searching for ballads brought to America by early settlers. Sharp reported that the isolated mountain people spoke in English accents and used expressions that had been obsolete for 100 years, inferring that their songs were the treasure trove he had hoped for. His collected songs were published as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians in 1917. Later, during the 1930s and 1940s, folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan traveled through the Appalachians with audio equipment, recording many of the ballads Sharp had written down during his research.

Bibliography

"Alan Lomax Collection." The American Folklife Center. Library of Congress, 2014. Web. 29 Aug. 2014.

http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/alanlomaxcollection.html

"The English and Scottish Popular Ballads." The Atlantic Monthly. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1883. Print.

http://books.google.com/books?id=13w4AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA404&dq=The+English+and+Scottish+Popular+Ballads+part+1&hl=en&sa=X&ei=D5UAVNa8Mo‗CggSK3oCYAQ&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20English%20and%20Scottish%20Popular%20Ballads%20part%201&f=false

"Glossary Terms." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2014. Web. 29 Aug. 2014.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/ballad

"What is the Literary Ballad?" The British Literary Ballads Archive. Literary Ballad Archive, 2008. Web. 29 Aug. 2014.

http://literaryballadarchive.com/en/what-is-the-literary-ballad.html

Sharp, Cecil J. Edited by Maud Karpeles. "Introduction." English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1917. Print.

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/english-folk-songs/southern-appalachians%20-%200012.htm

Würzbach, Natascha. "Introduction." The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NpxO5g7LEJwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=subject:%22Ballads,+English%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=g2‗‗U8SuH9WzggTtzoGQBg&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false