A ballad is a type of poem or song that tells a story. It was especially common in England, Ireland, and Scotland from the Late Middle Ages until the 19th century. Ballads were also found in many parts of Europe and later in Australia, North Africa, North America, and South America.

Ballads do not have a strict format and can have different numbers of lines and sections. However, many use four-line sections called quatrains. These often follow rhyme patterns where the second and fourth lines rhyme, such as A B C B or A B A B. Ballads usually avoid using couplets, which are pairs of rhyming lines.

Many ballads were printed on single sheets of paper called broadsides. Starting in the 18th century, poets and composers used this form to create lyrical ballads. By the late 19th century, the word "ballad" began to describe a slow type of love song. It is now often used to refer to any love song, especially in pop or rock music. However, the term is also linked to songs or poems that tell a story in a structured way, especially when used as titles for films or other media.

Origins

Ballads come from medieval French songs called chanson balladée or ballade. These songs were originally "dancing songs" (from the French word ballare, meaning to dance). Over time, they became "stylized forms of solo song" before being used in England. As storytelling songs, their themes and purposes may have started from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of storytelling, such as those found in poems like Beowulf. Musically, they were inspired by the Minnelieder of the Minnesang tradition. The earliest known example of a ballad in England is "Judas," found in a 13th-century manuscript.

Ballad form

Ballads were first created to go along with dances. They were written in couplets, with repeated lines called refrains that dancers sang while moving. Most ballads from northern and western Europe use a structure called ballad stanzas or quatrains, which are groups of four lines. These lines follow a rhythm pattern called ballad meter, alternating between iambic tetrameter (eight syllables with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) and iambic trimeter (six syllables). In this pattern, only the second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyme, following the rhyme scheme a, b, c, b. This suggests ballads originally had rhyming couplets with 14 syllables each. An example of this can be seen in the stanza from "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet":

The horse | fair Ann | et rode | up on | He amb | led like | the wind |,
With sil | ver he | was shod | be fore ,
With burn | ing gold | be hind |.

Ballads vary greatly in length, number of lines, and rhyme schemes, making it hard to define them strictly. In southern and eastern Europe, ballads often differ, such as Spanish romances, which use eight-syllable lines and assonance (repeating vowel sounds) instead of rhyme.

Ballads are strongly influenced by the regions where they come from, using the common language of the people. Scottish ballads, in particular, have unique themes and language, sometimes including supernatural elements like visits to the Fairy Kingdom, as seen in the Scots ballad "Tam Lin." Ballads usually have no known author or single correct version. Instead, they were passed down orally for centuries, leading to many variations. They remained an oral tradition until the 18th century, when collectors like Bishop Thomas Percy published collections of popular ballads.

Most ballads tell a story, often short and focused on vivid images rather than detailed descriptions. These stories can be tragic, historical, romantic, or comic. Themes about rural workers and their lives are common, and many ballads are based on the Robin Hood legend. Repetition is also a key feature, with lines or entire stanzas repeated for emphasis.

Composition

Scholars who study ballads are divided into two groups. One group, called "communalists," includes people like Johann Gottfried Herder and the Brothers Grimm. They believe ballads were originally created by communities working together. The other group, called "individualists," includes scholars like Cecil Sharp, who think each ballad had one original author. Communalists often view more recent ballads with known authors as less pure versions of the genre. Individualists, however, see different versions of ballads as changes to an original text. More recently, scholars have noted that ballads can exist in both spoken and written forms, and these forms can influence each other.

Transmission

The passing down of ballads is an important step in how they change over time. In romantic ideas, this process is often seen as a story of losing the purity of old traditions. In the introduction to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), the poet and writer Walter Scott argued that people should remove clear mistakes to try to find an original version. For Scott, repeated telling of ballads can lead to problems, such as unwanted additions from one person, confusing mistakes from another, or missing parts due to someone forgetting. Similarly, John Robert Moore observed that people naturally tend to forget details over time.

Classification

European ballads are usually grouped into three main types: traditional, broadside, and literary. In America, ballads are divided into two groups: those based on European songs, especially from England, Ireland, and Scotland, and "Native American ballads," which developed without using earlier songs. A later type, the blues ballad, combined ballad music with Afro-American music. In the late 20th century, the music publishing industry found success with sentimental ballads, which led to the modern use of the word "ballad" to describe slow love songs.

Traditional, classical, or popular ballads (meaning songs of the people) are believed to have started with wandering minstrels in late medieval Europe. From the end of the 15th century, printed ballads show a rich tradition of popular music. A mention in William Langland’s Piers Plowman suggests that ballads about Robin Hood were sung as early as the late 14th century. The oldest detailed collection of Robin Hood ballads was printed around 1495 by Wynkyn de Worde.

Early collections of English ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (born 1633, died 1703) and in the Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley (born 1661, died 1724). This work in England was similar to efforts in Scotland by Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Inspired by reading Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy as a teenager, Scott began collecting ballads while studying at Edinburgh University in the 1790s. He published his findings in a three-volume work called Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border between 1802 and 1803. Burns worked with James Johnson on the Scots Musical Museum, a collection of folk songs and poetry, including original work by Burns. Around the same time, Burns also worked with George Thompson on A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

Both Northern England and Southern Scotland shared a tradition of Border ballads, as seen in the cross-border story of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase." This ballad is sometimes linked to Richard Sheale, a 16th-century minstrel from Lancashire.

Some experts believe that growing interest in traditional ballads during the 18th century was influenced by social issues, such as the enclosure movement, as many ballads focused on rural workers’ lives. James Davey suggests that themes of sailing and naval battles may have also led to the use of ballads as tools to recruit sailors in England.

Important work on traditional ballads was done in the late 19th century. In Denmark, Svend Grundtvig studied ballads, while in England and Scotland, Harvard professor Francis James Child worked to record and classify all known ballads in his region. Child’s collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, included 305 ballads. Since Child died before writing a full explanation of his work, it is unclear exactly how he grouped the ballads. Traditional ballads are often divided into types such as religious, supernatural, tragic, love, historical, legendary, and humorous. Some traditional ballads were changed to create 23 bawdy, pornographic ballads published in the Victorian magazine The Pearl (1879–1880). These ballads mocked sentimental nostalgia and local stories, unlike traditional ballads.

Broadside ballads (also called "broadsheet," "stall," "vulgar," or "come all ye" ballads) appeared in the 16th century with the rise of cheap printing. They were printed on one side of a medium to large sheet of low-quality paper. In the first half of the 17th century, they used black-letter or gothic type and included eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune title, and an appealing poem. By the 18th century, they were printed in white letter or roman type with little decoration. These sheets sometimes included many songs, which were cut apart and sold as "slip songs" or folded into small books called "chapbooks." Chapbooks often used ballad stories. By the 1660s, over 400,000 broadside ballads were sold in England annually. Tessa Watt estimates that millions may have been sold. Many were sold by traveling sellers in city streets or at fairs. Topics included love, marriage, religion, drinking songs, legends, and early journalism about disasters, politics, and unusual events.

Literary or lyrical ballads developed as social elites and intellectuals became more interested in ballads, especially during the Romantic movement in the late 18th century. In Scotland, Robert Burns and Walter Scott collected and wrote their own ballads. In England, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge created Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which included Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats admired the simple style of folk ballads and tried to copy it. In Germany, Goethe and Schiller worked together on ballads, some of which were later set to music by Schubert. Later examples include Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892–1896) and Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897).

Ballad operas

In the 18th century, ballad operas became a type of English theater entertainment, partly because they opposed the influence of Italian opera in London. These operas included spoken dialogue in English that was often humorous or critical of society, with short songs added between parts of the story to keep the action moving. Unlike Italian opera, which focused on noble themes and music, ballad operas used popular folk songs and told stories about people from lower social classes. The stories often involved criminals or people from poor backgrounds and showed ideas that were the opposite of the strict moral lessons found in Italian opera.

The most famous ballad opera was The Beggar's Opera from 1728. It was written by John Gay and had music arranged by John Christopher Pepusch. Both were likely influenced by French vaudeville and the musical plays of Thomas d'Urfey, whose songs they used in their work. Gay later created another play called Polly. Other writers, such as Henry Fielding, Colley Cibber, and composers like Arne, Dibdin, and Shield, also wrote popular ballad operas. Ballad operas were performed in America and Prussia. Later, they changed to include more pastoral themes, such as in Love in a Village (1763) and Rosina (1781), which used original music that imitated folk songs instead of copying them directly. Though ballad operas became less popular by the end of the 18th century, they influenced later works like the early operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and modern musicals.

In the 20th century, The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht was a new version of The Beggar's Opera, using the same story and characters but only one song from the original. The term "ballad opera" has also been used for musicals that use folk music, such as The Martins and the Coys (1944) and The Transports (1977). The funny and critical style of ballad operas can also be seen in modern musicals like Chicago and Cabaret.

Beyond Europe

Some 300 ballads sung in North America have been found to have origins in Scottish traditional or broadside ballads. Examples include "The Streets of Laredo," which was also found in England, Ireland, and Scotland as "The Unfortunate Rake." Another 400 ballads have been identified as starting in America, with well-known examples such as "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and "Jesse James." Scholars became more interested in these ballads during the 19th century, and most were recorded or listed by George Malcolm Laws. Later, some songs were discovered to have British origins, and additional songs were collected over time. These ballads are usually most similar in form to British broadside ballads and are hard to tell apart in style. However, they often focus on jobs, use a journalistic style, and rarely include the humorous or risqué elements found in British broadside ballads.

The blues ballad is seen as a mix of Anglo-American and Afro-American music styles from the 19th century. Blues ballads often tell stories about active characters, such as anti-heroes, who face challenges and authority. These ballads usually do not have strong stories but instead focus on the characters themselves. They are often played on instruments like the banjo and guitar, following the blues musical style. Famous blues ballads include those about John Henry and Casey Jones.

Ballads were brought to Australia by early settlers from Great Britain and Ireland and became popular in the rural outback. These rhyming songs, poems, and stories often reflect the traveling and rebellious spirit of life in Australia’s bush areas. The people who wrote and performed these ballads are called bush bards. The 19th century was the most important time for bush ballads. Many collectors, including John Meredith, recorded these songs. Meredith’s recordings from the 1950s helped create the collection now held by the National Library of Australia. These songs share personal stories about life in Australia’s open countryside. Common themes include mining, raising and moving cattle, shearing sheep, traveling, war stories, the 1891 Australian shearers’ strike, conflicts between landless workers and landowners, and outlaws like Ned Kelly. Other topics include love and modern subjects like trucking. The most famous bush ballad is "Waltzing Matilda," which is sometimes called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia."

Sentimental ballads

Sentimental ballads, also known as "tear-jerkers" or "drawing-room ballads," became popular among middle-class audiences in the late 19th century. They originated during the early years of the "Tin Pan Alley" music industry. These songs were usually sentimental and told stories through structured verses. They were often published separately or as part of an opera. Some examples include "Little Rosewood Casket" (1870), "After the Ball" (1892), and "Danny Boy." These ballads may have developed from earlier broadside ballads but included printed music and were typically newly composed. Over time, the word "ballad" came to describe slow love songs starting in the 1950s. Today, variations of ballads include jazz ballads, pop ballads, rock ballads, R&B ballads, and power ballads. Many ballads appear in modern music from the 20th and 21st centuries, such as "Swear It Again" (1998) by Westlife.

References and further reading

• Dugaw, Dianne. Deep Play: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Print.
• Middleton, Richard. "Popular Music (I)." Grove Music Online, 8th edition. Oxford University Press, 2015. Originally published in 2001. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. Access requires a subscription, Wikilibrary access, or a UK public library membership.
• Randel, Don. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-674-61525-5.
• Temperley, Nicholas. "Ballad (from Lat. ballare: 'to dance')." Grove Music Online, 8th edition. Oxford University Press, 2013. Originally published in 2001. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. Access requires a subscription, Wikilibrary access, or a UK public library membership.
• Winton, Calhoun. John Gay and the London Theatre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Print.
• Witmer, Robert. "Ballad (jazz)." Grove Music Online, 8th edition. Oxford University Press, 2011. Originally published on January 20, 2002. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. Access requires a subscription, Wikilibrary access, or a UK public library membership.
• Marcello Sorce Keller. "Sul castel di mirabel: Life of a Ballad in Oral Tradition and Choral Practice." Ethnomusicology, vol. XXX, no. 3, 1986, pp. 449–469.