Medieval Ballads, Broadside Ballads, and Literary Ballads

1. Origins, Structure, and Evolution

2.  Definition: a narrative song.
 Origins:
 Usually in primitive societies such as that of
American frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries
and that of the English-Scottish border region in
the later Middle Ages.
 Revised and passed down orally during the 500
years period from 1200 to 1700
 One of the first recorded versions in 18th century:
Thomas Percy Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
 Francis. J. Child’s The English and Scottish Popular
Ballads (1882)

3.  Characteristics as an oral form of art:
 Simple language: Some ballads, especially older
traditional ballads, were composed for audiences of non-
specialist hearers or (later) readers. Therefore, they
feature language that people can understand without
specialist training or repeated readings.
 Stories: Ballads tend to be narrative poems, poems that
tell stories, as opposed to lyric poems, which emphasize
the emotions of the speaker.
 Ballad stanzas: The traditional ballad stanza consists of
four lines, rhymed ABCB (or sometimes ABAB -the key is
that the second and fourth lines rhyme). The first and
third lines have four stresses, while the second and fourth
have three.

4.  Characteristics (continued):
 Repetition: A ballad often has a refrain, a repeated section that
divides segments of the story. Many ballads also
employ incremental repetition, in which a phrase recurs with
minor differences as the story progresses. For a classic example
of incremental repetition, see the first two lines of each stanza
in "Lord Randal."
 Dialogue: As you might expect in a narrative genre, ballads
often incorporate multiple characters into their stories. Often,
since changes of voice were communicated orally, written
transcriptions of oral ballads give little or no indication that the
speaker has changed. Writers of literary ballads, the later
poems that imitate oral ballads, sometimes play with this
convention.
 Third-person objective narration: Ballad narrators usually do
not speak in the first person (unless speaking as a character in
the story), and they often do not comment on their reactions
to the emotional content of the ballad.

5.  Border ballads – heroic ballad celebrating the raids,
feuds, seductions, and elopements on the border
between England and Scotland in the 15th and 16th
centuries
 Historical – “Sir Patrick Spens”
 Outlaw – “Robin Hood”
 Romantic – “Barbara Allen”
 Supernatural – “Ancient Mariner”, “Demon Lover”
 Tragic – “Edward”

6.  Broadside ballads appeared shortly after the
invention of printing in the 15th century and
were hawked in streets, fairs, and marketplaces
of Europe into the 19th century.
 Typical broadsides included hack-written topical
ballads on recent crimes, executions, or
disasters. Many ballads passed into the oral
tradition from broadside origins.
 Although older texts were often “beautified” by
the addition of flowery, sentimental, or
moralizing language, broadsides also preserved
versions of traditional ballads that might
otherwise have disappeared from popular
tradition.

7.  In 1765 Thomas Percy published Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry.
It included old ballads and romances from
England and Scotland. Percy edited some of
the ballads, which sometimes meant toning
down their violent and sexual content, and
he or his friends added poems of their own
in imitation of the old ones. Percy's work
and that of other antiquarian scholars
sparked a "ballad revival" in Britain in the
form of literary ballads.

8. Some 19th-century poems in Ballad form:
 William Blake's “The Tyger” (six quatrains in
rhymed couplets. Trochee –hammering
beat– forging the tiger in the smithy.
7 or 8 syllables each line)
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” (sometimes 6 lines,
sometimes with internal rhymes)
 John Keats's “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

9.  Many modern writers have continued
writing in the ballad form; poets use it to
create certain effects and songwriters
(especially folk singer/songwriters) have
continued the tradition of the oral ballad.
 An example of a twentieth-century ballad
was written by Dudley Randall in response
to an attack on an Alabama church that
killed four teenage girls during the American
Civil Rights movement. (Ballad of
Birmingham, 1969.)