A ballad is a type of poem that often tells a story and is sometimes set to music. Ballads were especially common in the popular songs and poems of England, Ireland, and Scotland from the late Middle Ages up to the 19th century. They were also used in many parts of Europe and later in Australia, North Africa, North America, and South America.

Ballads do not have a fixed structure and can vary in the number of lines and stanzas they contain. However, many ballads use four-line stanzas called quatrains. These quatrains often follow rhyme patterns such as A B C B or A B A B, where the second and fourth lines rhyme. Ballads rarely use couplets, which are pairs of rhyming lines.

Many ballads were printed on single sheets of paper and sold individually. From the 18th century onward, poets and composers used this form to create lyrical ballads. By the late 19th century, the word "ballad" came to describe a slow, romantic song. It is now often used to refer to love songs in pop or rock music. However, the term also describes a structured storytelling song or poem, especially when used as a title for movies or other media.

Origins

Ballads come from medieval French songs called chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally "dancing songs" (from the French word "ballare," meaning "to dance"). Over time, these songs became "stylized forms of solo song" before being used in England. As a type of narrative song, ballads often tell stories and may have roots in storytelling traditions from Scandinavia and Germany, such as those found in poems like Beowulf. Musically, they were influenced by the Minnelieder, a type of song from the Minnesang tradition. The earliest known example of a ballad in England is the song "Judas," which appears in a 13th-century manuscript.

Ballad form

Ballads were originally written to go along with dances. They were made using couplets, which are pairs of lines, and had repeated lines called refrains. These refrains were sung by dancers as they moved. Most ballads from northern and western Europe are written in ballad stanzas, which are groups of four lines called quatrains. These quatrains follow a pattern of alternating lines with eight syllables (called iambic tetrameter) and six syllables (called iambic trimeter). This pattern is known as ballad meter. Usually, only the second and fourth lines of a quatrain rhyme, following the rhyme pattern a, b, c, b. This suggests that ballads may have started as pairs of rhyming lines, each with 14 syllables. An example of this can be seen in this 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 widely in length, number of lines, and rhyme patterns, making it hard to define them strictly. In southern and eastern Europe, and in countries influenced by these regions, ballads have different structures. For example, Spanish romances use eight-syllable lines and focus on vowel sounds rather than rhymes.

Ballads are often shaped by the regions where they come from, using the common language of the people in those areas. Scottish ballads, in particular, have unique themes and language, showing strong traditions that sometimes include supernatural elements, like traveling to the Fairy Kingdom in the ballad "Tam Lin." Ballads usually do not have a known author or a single correct version. Instead, they were passed down through oral tradition for many years. They remained oral until the 18th century, when people like Bishop Thomas Percy began collecting and publishing ballads.

Most ballads tell a story, often short and self-contained, using vivid images rather than detailed descriptions. These stories can be sad, historical, romantic, or funny. Many ballads focus on the lives and experiences of rural workers. Another common feature is repetition, such as repeating the fourth line of a stanza as a refrain or repeating entire stanzas.

Composition

Scholars who study ballads are divided into two groups: "communalists," such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and the Brothers Grimm, who believe ballads were originally created by communities together. The other group, called "individualists," such as Cecil Sharp, believes each ballad had one original author. Communalists often view more recent printed ballads with known authors as a less pure version of the genre, while individualists see different versions of a ballad as changes that made the original text less clear. More recently, scholars have noted that ballads often mix oral traditions with written forms.

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 about losing the original version of old traditions. In the introduction to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), the romantic poet and writer Walter Scott argued that it was necessary to remove clear mistakes in order to try to find a supposed original version. Scott believed that when ballads are shared many times, they risk having extra parts added by someone who is too confident, unclear mistakes made by someone who doesn’t understand, or important parts left out because someone forgets them. Similarly, John Robert Moore observed that there is a natural tendency for people to forget details over time.

Classification

European ballads are usually divided into three main categories: traditional, broadside, and literary. In America, ballads are often separated into those based on European songs, like English, Irish, and Scottish ones, and "Native American ballads," which were created without using earlier songs. Later, the blues ballad developed, mixing ballad styles 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 (meaning of the people) ballads are believed to have started with wandering minstrels in late medieval Europe. By the end of the 15th century, printed ballads showed a strong 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 ballads are from Wynkyn de Worde’s collection of Robin Hood songs, printed around 1495.

Early collections of English ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and Robert Harley (1661–1724), who gathered the Roxburghe Ballads. This work 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 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803). Burns worked with James Johnson on the Scots Musical Museum, a collection of folk songs and poetry, including original works by Burns. Around the same time, he also collaborated with George Thompson on A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

Both Northern English and Southern Scots shared a tradition of Border ballads, as seen in the cross-border story in versions of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase," sometimes linked to the 16th-century minstrel Richard Sheale.

Some historians believe the growing interest in traditional ballads during the 18th century was influenced by social issues like the enclosure movement, as many ballads focused on rural laborers. James Davey suggests that themes of sailing and naval battles may have 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 by Svend Grundtvig in Denmark and Francis James Child, a Harvard professor, for England and Scotland. They aimed to record and classify all known ballads and their variations. Since Child died before explaining his work, it is unclear exactly how he sorted the 305 ballads in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Many attempts have been made to classify traditional ballads by theme, with common types including religious, supernatural, tragic, love, historic, legendary, and humorous ballads. The traditional ballad style was later changed to create 23 bawdy, pornographic ballads in the Victorian magazine The Pearl, which published 18 issues between 1879 and 1880. These ballads mocked sentimental nostalgia and local stories, unlike traditional ones.

Broadside ballads (also called "broadsheet," "stall," "vulgar," or "come all ye" ballads) appeared with the development of cheap printing in the 16th century. They were printed on one side of a medium to large sheet of poor-quality paper. In the first half of the 17th century, they used black-letter or gothic fonts and included illustrations, catchy tune titles, and poems. By the 18th century, they were printed in white letter or roman fonts with little decoration. These sheets often contained many songs, which were later cut into "slip songs" or folded into small books called "chapbooks." They were sold in large numbers, with over 400,000 sold in England annually by the 1660s. Tessa Watt estimates that millions may have been sold. Many were sold by traveling sellers in city streets or at fairs. Topics ranged from love and marriage to religion, drinking songs, legends, and early journalism, which included disasters, political events, and strange occurrences.

Literary or lyrical ballads developed from growing interest in ballads among social elites and intellectuals, 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 published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which included Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats admired the simple, natural style of folk ballads and tried to copy it. In Germany, Goethe and Schiller worked on ballads, some of which were later set to music by Schubert. Later examples of the poetic form 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 stage entertainment. They developed partly because of a desire to challenge the influence of Italian opera in London. Ballad operas included spoken English dialogue that was often bold and humorous, with short songs that did not interrupt the story. Unlike Italian opera, which focused on aristocratic themes and music, ballad operas used popular folk songs and told stories about lower-class characters. These stories often involved people from the lower classes, including criminals, and showed ideas that were different from the strong moral values of Italian opera at the time.

The most important and successful ballad opera was The Beggar's Opera from 1728. It was written by John Gay and had music arranged by John Christopher Pepusch. Both men were likely influenced by French vaudeville and the musical plays of Thomas d'Urfey, whose songs they used in their work. John Gay later created more ballad operas, including a follow-up called Polly. Other writers, such as Henry Fielding, Colley Cibber, Arne, Dibdin, Arnold, Shield, Jackson of Exeter, Hook, and many others, also wrote popular ballad operas. Ballad operas were tried in America and Prussia. Later, the style changed to include more pastoral themes, as seen in Love in a Village (1763) and Rosina (1781). These works used original music that imitated, but did not copy, existing ballads. Though ballad operas became less popular by the end of the 18th century, their influence can be seen in later works like the early operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, such as The Sorcerer, and in 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. It told a similar story with the same characters and included similar humorous and critical elements, but used only one song from the original. The term "ballad opera" has also been used to describe musicals that use folk music, such as The Martins and the Coys (1944) and The Transports (1977). The humorous 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. An example is "The Streets of Laredo," which was also known as "The Unfortunate Rake" in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Another 400 ballads were identified as having started in America, with well-known examples including "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and "Jesse James." Scholars became more interested in these ballads during the 19th century, and most were recorded or catalogued by George Malcolm Laws. Later, some songs were found to have British origins, and more songs were collected over time. These ballads are usually 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 content found in British broadside ballads.

The blues ballad is a mix of Anglo-American and Afro-American musical styles from the 19th century. These ballads often tell stories about characters who face challenges and fight against authority, but they may not always have a clear story. Instead, they focus on the characters themselves. They are usually 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 independent and rebellious spirit of life in the Australian bush. People who write and perform 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. His work in 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 workers and landowners, and outlaws like Ned Kelly. They also include stories about love and modern topics like trucking. The most famous bush ballad is "Waltzing Matilda," which is often called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia."

Sentimental ballads

Sentimental ballads, sometimes called "tear-jerkers" or "drawing-room ballads" because they were popular among middle-class people, began in the early "Tin Pan Alley" music industry of the late 19th century. These songs were usually emotional, told a story, and had repeated verses. They were often sold separately or included in operas. They may have been inspired by older songs called broadside ballads, but they had printed music and were usually newly written. Examples include "Little Rosewood Casket" (1870), "After the Ball" (1892), and "Danny Boy." Over time, the word "ballad" came to describe slow love songs starting in the 1950s. Today, there are many types of ballads, such as jazz ballads, pop ballads, rock ballads, R&B ballads, and power ballads. Many ballads are still used in modern music, like "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. Printed.
• Middleton, Richard (13 January 2015) [2001]. "Popular Music (I)". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. (Available with a subscription, through Wikilibrary, or with a UK public library card.)
• 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. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. (Available with a subscription, through Wikilibrary, or with a UK public library card.)
• Winton, Calhoun. John Gay and the London Theatre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Printed.
• Witmer, Robert (14 October 2011) [20 January 2002]. "Ballad (jazz)". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. (Available with a subscription, through Wikilibrary, or with a UK public library card.)
• Marcello Sorce Keller, "Sul castel di mirabel: Life of a Ballad in Oral Tradition and Choral Practice", Ethnomusicology, Volume 30, Issue 3, pages 449–469 (1986).