Ballad

For other uses, see Ballad (disambiguation).
"Balladeering" redirects here. For the album, see Balladeering (album).
Illustration by Arthur Rackham of the ballad "The Twa Corbies"

A ballad /ˈbæləd/ is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally "dancing songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of the British Isles from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa.

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 now often used for any love song, particularly the pop or rock sentimental ballad.

Origins

A sixteenth-century printed ballad, the A Gest of Robyn Hode

The ballad derives its name from medieval French dance songs or "ballares" (L: ballare, to dance),[1] from which 'ballet' is also derived, as did the alternative rival form that became the French ballade.[2][3] 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 Beowulf.[4] Musically they were influenced by the Minnesinger.[5] The earliest example of a recognisable ballad in form in England is "Judas" in a 13th-century manuscript.[6]

Ballad form

See also: AABA form

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.[7] 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.[8] This can be seen in this stanza from "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet":

The horse | fair Ann | et rode | upon |
He amb | led like | the wind |,
With sil | ver he | was shod | before,
With burn | ing gold | behind |.[4]

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.[9]

Ballads usually use the common dialect of the people and are heavily influenced by the region in which they originate. Scottish ballads in particular are distinctively un-English, even showing some pre-Christian influences in the inclusion of supernatural elements such as the fairies in the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin".[10] 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 to publish volumes of popular ballads.[7]

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.[8] Themes concerning rural laborers and their sexuality are common, and there are many ballads based on the Robin Hood legend.[11] 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.[4]

Composition

A copy of Walter Scott's The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

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.[6] 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.[12] More recently scholars have pointed to the interchange of oral and written forms of the ballad.[13]

Transmission

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.'[14] In the introduction to The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) the romantic writer Walter Scott noted the need to 'remove obvious corruptions' in order to attempt to restore the 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'.[15] According to Scott, transcribed ballads often have a 'flatness and insipidity' compared to their oral counterparts.

Classification

Illustration by Arthur Rackham to Young Bekie.

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.

Traditional ballads

See also: Child Ballads

The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as beginning with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe.[4] 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.[16]

Early collections of English ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and in the Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724).[16] In the 18th century there were increasing numbers of such collections, including Thomas d'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719–20) and Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).[16] The last of these also contained some oral material and by the end of the 18th century this was becoming increasingly common, with collections including John Ritson's, The Bishopric Garland (1784), which paralleled the work of Walter Scott and Robert Burns[16] who, in Scotland, collected and compiled major collections of Border ballad and Scottish song in Scott's Minstrelsy and through Burns' contributions to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Scottish Airs. Both northern English and Southern Scots shared in the identified tradition of Border ballads, including what is often said to be the finest, ‘The Ballad of Chevy Chase', thought to have been composed by the Lancashire-born sixteenth-century minstrel Richard Sheale.[17]

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.[18] 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.[19]

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.[6] 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.[20] 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.[4]

Broadsides

Main article: Broadside (music)
An 18th-century broadside ballad: The tragical ballad: or, the lady who fell in love with her serving-man.

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 their heyday of 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 tile, as well as an alluring poem.[21] 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 "slipsongs." Alternatively, they might be folded to make small cheap books or "chapbooks" which often drew on ballad stories.[22] They were produced in huge numbers, with over 400,000 being sold in England annually by the 1660s.[23] Tessa Watt estimates the number of copies sold may have been in the millions.[24] Many were sold by travelling chapmen in city streets or at fairs.[25] 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.[26]

Literary ballads

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 like Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott in Scotland both collected and wrote their own ballads, using the form to create an artistic product. Similarly in England William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced a collection of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, including Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats were attracted to the simple and natural style of these folk ballads, encouraging them to imitate the style [27] 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.[28] 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).[29] Victorian and late Romantic poets such as Christina Rossetti deployed ballad forms to explore spiritual and moral issues and used the form to discuss the stereotypical treatment and representation of men and women's roles in society.

Ballad operas

Main article: Ballad opera
Painting based on The Beggar's Opera, Act III Scene 2, William Hogarth, c. 1728

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.[30] 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.[31] 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.[32] 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.[33] 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.[34] 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.[35] 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.[36] The satiric elements of ballad opera can be seen in some modern musicals such as Chicago and Cabaret.[37]

Beyond Europe

Native American ballads

Statue of John Henry outside the town of Talcott in Summers County, West Virginia

Native American ballads are ballads that are native to North America (not to be confused with ballads performed by Native Americans).[38] Some 300 ballads sung in North America have been identified as having origins in British traditional or broadside ballads.[38] 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 North America, including among the best known, ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett' and 'Jesse James'.[38] 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.[38] 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.[13]

Blues ballads

Main article: Blues ballad

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.[38] They were often accompanied by banjo and guitar which followed the blues musical format.[13] The most famous blues ballads include those about John Henry and Casey Jones.[38]

Bush ballads

Main article: Bush ballad
Cover to Banjo Paterson's seminal 1905 collection of bush ballads, entitled The Old Bush Songs

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.[39] 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.[39] 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.[40] The most famous bush ballad is "Waltzing Matilda", which has been called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia".[41]

Sentimental ballads

Main article: Sentimental ballad

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".[38] The association with sentimentality led to the term "ballad" being used for a slow love songs from the 1950s onwards. Modern variations include "jazz ballads", "pop ballads" and "power ballads".[42]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ W. Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (Harvard, 1944; 2nd edn., 1972), p. 70.
  2. ↑ A. Jacobs, A Short History of Western Music (1972, Penguin, 1976), p. 21.
  3. ↑ W. Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (1944, Harvard, 1972), pp. 70-72.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 J. E. Housman, British Popular Ballads (1952, London: Ayer Publishing, 1969), p. 15.
  5. ↑ A. Jacobs, A Short History of Western Music (Penguin 1972, 1976), p. 20.
  6. 1 2 3 A. N. Bold, The Ballad (Routledge, 1979), p. 5.
  7. 1 2 "Popular Ballads", The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, p. 610.
  8. 1 2 D. Head and I. Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 66.
  9. ↑ T. A. Green, Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 81.
  10. ↑ "Popular Ballads" The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, pp. 610-17.
  11. ↑ http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/980
  12. ↑ M. Hawkins-Dady, Reader's Guide to Literature in English (Taylor & Francis, 1996), p. 54.
  13. 1 2 3 T. A. Green, Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 353.
  14. ↑ Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 140.
  15. ↑ "The Influence of transmission on the English Ballads", Modern Language Review 11 (1916), p. 387.
  16. 1 2 3 4 B. Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 45.
  17. ↑ D. Gregory, ‘“The Songs of the People for Me’’: The Victorian Rediscovery of Lancashire Vernacular Song’, Canadian Folk Music/Musique folklorique canadienne, 40 (2006), pp. 12-21.
  18. ↑ Robin Ganev,Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in 18th Century Britain
  19. ↑
  20. ↑ T. A. Green, Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 352.
  21. ↑ E. Nebeker, "The Heyday of the Broadside Ballad", English Broadside Ballad Archive, University of California-Santa Barbara, retrieved 15 August 2011.
  22. ↑ G. Newman and L. E. Brown, Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714-1837: An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 1997), pp. 39-40.
  23. ↑ B. Capp, ‘Popular literature’, in B. Reay, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Routledge, 1985), p. 199.
  24. ↑ T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 11.
  25. ↑ M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 111-28.
  26. ↑ B. Capp, ‘Popular literature’, in B. Reay, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Routledge, 1985), p. 204.
  27. ↑ "Popular Ballads", The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, p. 610.
  28. ↑ J. R. Williams, The Life of Goethe (Blackwell Publishing, 2001), pp. 106-8.
  29. ↑ S. Ledger, S. McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 152.
  30. ↑ M. Lubbock, The Complete Book of Light Opera (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962) pp. 467-68.
  31. ↑ "Ballad opera", Encyclopedia Britanica, retrieved 7 April 2015.
  32. ↑ F. Kidson, The Beggar's Opera: Its Predecessors and Successors (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 71.
  33. ↑ M. Lubbock, The Complete Book of Light Opera (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), pp. 467-68.
  34. ↑ G. Wren, A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 41.
  35. ↑ K. Lawrence, Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-century "British" Literary Canons (University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 30.
  36. ↑ A. J. Aby and P. Gruchow, The North Star State: A Minnesota History Reader, (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), p. 461.
  37. ↑ L. Lehrman, Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-bibliography (Greenwood, 2005), p. 568.
  38. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 N. Cohen, Folk Music: a Regional Exploration (Greenwood, 2005), pp. 14-29.
  39. 1 2 Kerry O'Brien December 10, 2003 7:30 Report, abc.net.au
  40. ↑ G. Smith, Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music (Pluto Press Australia, 2005), p. 2.
  41. ↑ Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?", The National Library of Australia, retrieved 14 March 2008.
  42. ↑ N. Cohen, Folk Music: a Regional Exploration (Greenwood, 2005), p. 297.

References and further reading

External links

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