Love, Lust, And Ballads
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Love, lust, murder, thievery, incest, death, and betrayal are just some of the intriguing, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing topics of a traditional ballad. A traditional what? A ballad is
“a song that tells a story, or- to take the other point of view – a story told in song. More formallya short poem, adapted for singing, simple in plot and metrical s structure, divided into stanzas, and characterized by complete impersonality so far as the author or singer is concerned.”(Kittredge, Zweig, 3)
The songs tend to leave out details and go straight to the heart of the story, even though some ballads, like “The Outlaw Murray and “The Young Tamlane” go on for
seventy-five and fifty-six stanzas, respectively. So whats the big deal about some songs
that tell of broken hearts, star-crossed lovers and unmerciful murderers? These old, carefully preserved ballads can be said to be the building blocks of music of today and throughout the ages; a “backbone”, if you will, that can be seen in the format and rhythms of lyrics and tones in some of todays most popular genres of music, such as rock, punk, and country while also having many ties to the genres historically. It is also possible that songs from this genre might be able to be classified as a type of ballad.
There are two main categories of these ballads. They are the border ballads, which are probably more commonly known and studied, and there are the broadside ballads. The broadside ballads were very very popular in the late 1500s and 1600s. They were,
“songs with new lyrics put to popular tunes, transmitted by writing rather than orally,
and primarily an urban phenomenon.”(
The border ballads, however, are thought to be of Scotch-Irish origin, and were found to be passed down orally from one generation in a family to the next. Since the people passing down these “living traditions” were not very well educated, if at all, the ballads tend to be repetitive for easier memorization. Also, each person sang each ballad differently, which resulted in many different versions of the same ballads, with some different words and slight differences in the tunes since each persons voice is different and over time some words are forgotten. Thirdly, as time went on some generations of each family did not embrace or care as much for the ballads as their elders did, which results in an understanding that a lot of ballads have been lost.
This is where James Francis Child comes into play. Who? Well, unlike the famous Julia Child, he definitely was not a world-renowned cook. On the contrary, James Francis Child is the most known and popular name in the world of the ballads. After many, many years of hard work and a lot of research, Child was able to put together a very detailed collection of the ballads, entitled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. This five-volume set of books holds “every traditional English or Scottish ballad Child was able to find.” The volumes include 305 different groups of songs, and because of the many changes made from each person singing the ballads, some have “over a hundred variants.” This collection of ballads is also referred to as the “Child Ballads”, and has been held high above most other collections. The collection has the lyrics of all the songs, along with complex essays and traces the roots of every ballad.
There are five main characteristics of traditional ballads, which are the ballad tells some sort of story, it focuses on what is going on in the story with little attention to details, the metrical and sentence structures are simple and to the point, it is sung to a modal melody , and the ballad comes from oral traditions with an author unbeknownst to the reader or singer. The ballad usually tells a story in the first person point of view, and is unlike a normal story in that it mixes up the sequence in which the occurring events are told, which can be quite confusing to the reader or listener. Also, certain phrases and situations tend to repeat in the ballad multiple times. Secondly, details are not very important at all. The common questions of who, what, when, and where can be answered satisfiably without all the insignificant details of what someone looked like or what they wore. Sometimes the ballad is told entirely in dialogue form, which can be seen in an excerpt from a ballad such as Child Ballad #13, “Edward”;
“Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair, Edward, Edward,
Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Sum other dule ye drie O.
“O I hae killed my fadir deir, Mither, Mither,
O I hae killed my fadir deir,
Alas and wae is me O!”(Routledge 137)
Next, the actual structure of a ballad is pretty simple. The presumably most common form of stanzas in a ballad has four lines. Within these four lines, the stanzas may have four syllable stresses per line, or they may even have four syllable stresses in one line, and three syllable stresses in the next line, which alternate in every line. As mentioned earlier, there are a few different kinds of modal melodies used for ballads. The four most common are Ionian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Dorian. This was mainly documented in the four-volume collection of The Singing Tradition of Childs Popular Ballads, written by Bertrand H. Bronson. Finally, none of these ballads are known to have authors. They were just “sung down” from generation to generation, town to town over time. Ballads that have been “created” to be similar to traditional ballads are noticeably different from those that have been passed down orally over time. Traditional ballads usually have one of three common rhyming patterns; abac, aabb, or acbc. As mentioned earlier, ballads have a lot of dialogue and action is usually told in the first person. Since repetition is used so often, it comes as no surprise that there are three different types of repetition that is used. Like a songs chorus, entire stanzas can be repeated. Lines can also be repeated but certain words are often changed. One of the most common types is the question and answer format. This is where one stanza asks a question (or many), and the subsequent stanza answers the question(s). Finally, very commonly sequences of three are used. Some of the most common are three questions, three kisses, three requests,