Ballad, English And Scottish Popular Ballads,

Ballad,,English And Scottish Popular Ballads,
short narrative folk song that fixes on the most dramatic part of a story, moving to its conclusion by means of dialogue and a series of incidents. The word ballad was first used in a general sense to mean a simple short poem. Such a poem could be narrative or lyric, sung or not sung, crude or polite, sentimental or satiric, religious or secular; it was vaguely associated with dance. The word is still commonly used in this loose fashion. In the field of folklore, however, ballad is applied specifically to the kind of narrative folk song described in the opening lines. These narrative songs represent a type of literature and music that developed across Europe in the late Middle Ages. Unlike the medieval romances and rhymed tales, ballads tend to have a tight dramatic structure that sometimes omits all preliminary material, all exposition and description, even all motivation, to focus on the climactic scene (as in the British “Lord Randall”). It is as though the ballad presented only the last act of a play, leaving the listener or reader to supply the antecedent material. When the ballad emerged, it was a new form of art and literature, distinct from anything that had gone before.

Ranging from detailed, fully plotted narratives to almost purely lyric songs, the ballads of different lands and eras are remarkably varied. Moreover, within the variants of any particular ballad, great differences in structure may exist. Because it is transmitted orally, each ballad is subject to continual change; for instance, England's “The Waggoner's Lad” began with a full plot, but its American derivative “On Top of Old Smoky” is a near lyric. Generally, the closer a ballad is to polite literature, the more detail it carries. Oral tradition tends to discard nonessential elements.

II  Ballad Tunes,

Ballads are meant to be sung. Although they are sometimes written down in song or “ballet” books, and although they are often studied as poetry, ballads are normally performed (with or without instrumental accompaniment) at home in the evening, in the bunkhouse, at the cribside, or in other everyday situations. The melodies of the ballads are important, influencing meter, stress, style, and—above all—mood. Nonetheless, the melodies are independent of the texts. Tunes and texts often marry, and an individual tune may always accompany an individual text, but many separations occur. Some tunes, such as the one used in the United States for the cowboy song “The Streets of Laredo” or that used for “Vilikins and His Dinah,” attach themselves to a number of ballads (and to hymns and love lyrics as well), their variants forming what are known as tune families. See also Folk Music.

III  Origins And Predecessors,

Aesthetically, the ballad is considered by many to be the most remarkable and beautiful art form that the folk traditions of the world have developed. Precisely how or when it originated is not known. What is certain, however, is that the ballad is relatively recent. Failure to distinguish the ballad from its counterpart, the epic lai (another form of short narrative poetry), led early scholars to think that the ballad had survived from earlier days and to formulate the now-discredited theory of “communal origins,” which postulated that ballads were produced by groups of people inspired to compose by some recent excitement in the community. In comparison with the epic lai, the ballad tends to be domestic rather than national or fabulous, simple rather than rhetorical and inflated in language, and stanzaic and rhymed rather than nonstanzaic and unrhymed. Nonetheless, ballads and epic lais have overlapped and mingled, especially in parts of Russia and Eastern Europe, and the two genres are not always easy to distinguish.

IV  Ballad Poetry, 

The ballads of Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and Italy are all stanzaic, as are many Spanish-language ballads. British ballads, which form a particularly rich and artistic canon, most often consist of a series of quatrains having the stress pattern 4 3 4 3 (such quatrains were originally 7-stress couplets), but a 4 4 4 4 stress pattern is also popular. The quatrains are rhymed and often have refrains to comment on the action or to emphasize mood. Dialogue often proceeds without identification of the speakers, and conversation and action often build incrementally to a dramatic conclusion. Some ballads move in what has been described as a “lingering and leaping” style, focusing on one vignette, then suddenly jumping to a completely different scene. Much of the language and action are stylized: Clichés are frequent (“rosy-red lips,””lily-white hands,””milk-white steeds”), as is conventionalized conduct (a lover opening a casket to kiss the “cold, clay lips” of a corpse; a man taking a girl on his knee to hear an explanation). Stories may even share standardized conclusions.

V  Traditional, Broadside, And Native Ballads,


Somewhat artificially, scholars divide the English-language ballads into traditional ballads, broadside ballads, and native ballads of former British colonies. The traditional ballads are also known as Child ballads after the American scholar Francis James Child, who, in his book The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 volumes, 1882-98), compiled what he considered a canon of 305 ballads the histories of which date from or nearly from the Middle Ages. Although only eight ballads can be traced in manuscript and print to the Middle Ages, and although Child missed some ballads such as “The Bitter Withy” and “Father Grumble” and ignored bawdy ballads such as “The Sea-Crab,” his canon has been so widely accepted that to call a ballad a Child ballad is to say that it represents the oldest British tradition. “The Sweet Trinity” (commonly sung in America as “The Golden Vanity”), “The Elfin Knight” (commonly sung in America as “Scarborough Fair”), and “Barbara Allen” are all Child ballads.

Broadside ballads are those that appeared, normally without music, on the broadsheets that printers sold as a form of early newspaper to capitalize on hangings, battles, and other sensationalism. A printer who ran out of copy might well put an old ballad on the sheet. Soon ballad printing became big business, and printers hired ballad composers (the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith once worked at this) and itinerant singers to write and hawk songs. Many of these songs, such as “The Broken Token,””The Lexington Murder,” and “Brennan on the Moor,” became popular enough to enter the repertoires of folksingers. Broadside ballads flourished in Britain from as early as the 1500s until they were superseded by modern songbooks, sheet music, and records.

Wherever the British went—to Australia, Canada, America—they took their traditional and broadside ballads with them. In the new countries, ballads on local topics were soon composed by local singers and printers, so that a canon of native Australian, Canadian, and American balladry grew up. Representative of the U.S. contribution are “John Henry,””Frankie and Johnny,””Young Charlotte,” and “Springfield Mountain”. A few U.S. ballads, such as “The Texas Rangers,” were even transported back to the British Isles.

VI  Literary Ballads,

Folk ballads have been collected, edited, and studied by enthusiasts and scholars for centuries. In fact, so much interest has been generated that the folk ballad has given birth to a major poetic form, the literary ballad. Distinguished writers—such as the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Algernon Swinburne, and A. E. Housman, the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many others—have left a large number of English-language poems that imitate both the traditional and the broadside ballad, while developing the form in fresh ways.