Ballad is a song that tells a dramatic story in verse. Ballads are one of the oldest forms of poetry and one of the oldest kinds of music. The term ballad may refer to any story told in song. But most ballads are folk songs or imitations of such songs. In the Middle Ages, singing poets called minstrels wandered over Europe, performing ballads in castles and villages (see Minstrel).
Ballads began thousands of years ago among people who could not read or write. The first ballads were performed with folk dances. Often, one person sang the story and dancers joined in on the refrain. Subjects of ancient ballads may have been the same gods and godlike heroes who were in myths and epics. Later, singers replaced the gods with new heroes, including the legendary English outlaw Robin Hood and the American railroad engineer Casey Jones.
The ballad style.
Ballads have been created in many verse forms, but the most typical form in English has been the four-line stanza. An example is the first stanza of the ballad “The Wife of Usher’s Well”:
Loading the player...There lived a wife at Usher’s Well And a wealthy wife was she; She had three stout and stalwart sons, And sent them o’er the sea.
English ballad
In the stanza, the first and third lines have four beats. The second and fourth lines have three. This pattern is called common measure (see Poetry (Rhythm and meter)).
The opening stanza of most ballads introduces the characters and a situation in a few vivid phrases. The situation involves a problem or some danger that creates suspense and stirs interest.
Ballads and literature.
During the 1700’s, authors and scholars began taking an interest in ballads they had heard sung. Thomas Percy, an English scholar, collected many ballads in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). This collection was the first serious attempt to preserve the ballads of English and Scottish folk singers. It included the first published versions of the famous ballads Sir Patrick Spens and Edward, Edward. As a result of Percy’s collection, writers began to appreciate the literary quality of ballads. Many important poets of the English romantic movement adopted the ballad form.
In the 1900’s, such poets as W. H. Auden, Stephen Vincent Benét, and John Crowe Ransom wrote in the ballad form. Some popular American singers, including Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, composed songs that imitate traditional ballads. But few ballads created by one individual have the powerful simplicity of those performed and refined by generations of singers.
