ballad

—balladic /beuh lad"ik/, adj. —balladlike, adj.

/bal"euhd/, n.

1. any light, simple song, esp. one of sentimental or romantic character, having two or more stanzas all sung to the same melody.

2. a simple narrative poem of folk origin, composed in short stanzas and adapted for singing.

3. any poem written in similar style.

4. the music for a ballad.

5. a sentimental or romantic popular song.

[1350-1400; ME balade < MF < OPr balada dance, dancing-song, equiv. to bal(ar) to dance ( < LL ballare; see BALL²) + -ada -ADE¹]

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Form of short narrative folk song.

Its distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages as part of the oral tradition, and it has been preserved as a musical and literary form. The oral form has persisted as the folk ballad, and the written, literary ballad evolved from the oral tradition. The folk ballad typically tells a compact tale with deliberate starkness, using devices such as repetition to heighten effects. The modern literary ballad (e.g., those by W.H. Auden, Bertolt Brecht, and Elizabeth Bishop) recalls in its rhythmic and narrative elements the traditions of folk balladry.

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▪ narrative song

Introduction

      short narrative folk song whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have little affected the habit of folk singing.

      France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Spain, as well as England and Scotland, possess impressive ballad collections. At least one-third of the 300 extant English and Scottish ballads have counterparts in one or several of these continental balladries, particularly those of Scandinavia. In no two language areas, however, are the formal characteristics of the ballad identical. For example, British and American ballads are invariably rhymed and strophic (strophe) (i.e., divided into stanzas); the Russian ballads known as byliny (bylina) and almost all Balkan ballads are unrhymed and unstrophic; and, though the romances (romancero) of Spain, as their ballads are called, and the Danish viser are alike in using assonance instead of rhyme, the Spanish ballads are generally unstrophic while the Danish are strophic, parcelled into either quatrains or couplets.

      In reception, however, the ballad's technique and form are often subordinated to its presentation of events—especially ones presented as historical, whether factually accurate or not—and their significance to the audience. The ballad also plays a critical role in the creation and maintenance of distinct national cultures. In contemporary literature and music, the ballad is primarily defined by its commitment to nostalgia, community histories, and romantic love.

Albert B. Friedman Ed.

Elements

Narrative basis

      Typically, the folk ballad tells a compact little story that begins eruptively at the moment when the narrative has turned decisively toward its catastrophe or resolution. Focusing on a single, climactic situation, the ballad leaves the inception of the conflict and the setting to be inferred or sketches them in hurriedly. Characterization is minimal, the characters revealing themselves in their actions or speeches; overt moral comment on the characters' behaviour is suppressed and their motivation seldom explicitly detailed. Whatever description occurs in ballads is brief and conventional; transitions between scenes are abrupt and time shifts are only vaguely indicated; crucial events and emotions are conveyed in crisp, poignant dialogue. In short, the ballad method of narration is directed toward achieving a bold, sensational, dramatic effect with purposeful starkness and abruptness. But despite the rigid economy of ballad narratives, a repertory of rhetorical (rhetoric) devices is employed for prolonging highly charged moments in the story and thus thickening the emotional atmosphere. In the most famous of such devices, incremental repetition, a phrase or stanza is repeated several times with a slight but significant substitution at the same critical point. Suspense accumulates with each substitution, until at last the final and revelatory substitution bursts the pattern, achieving a climax and with it a release of powerful tensions. The following stanza is a typical example:

Then out and came the thick, thick, blood,

Then out and came the thin,

Then out and came the bonny heart's blood,

Where all the life lay in.

Oral transmission

      Since ballads thrive among unlettered people and are freshly created from memory at each separate performance, they are subject to constant variation in both text and tune. Where tradition is healthy and not highly influenced by literary or other outside cultural influences, these variations keep the ballad alive by gradually bringing it into line with the style of life, beliefs, and emotional needs of the immediate folk audience. Ballad tradition, however, like all folk arts, is basically conservative, a trait that explains the references in several ballads to obsolete implements and customs, as well as the appearance of words and phrases that are so badly garbled as to indicate that the singer does not understand their meaning though he takes pleasure in their sound and respects their traditional right to a place in his version of the song. The new versions of ballads that arise as the result of cumulative variations are no less authentic than their antecedents. A poem is fixed in its final form when published, but the printed or taped record of a ballad is representative only of its appearance in one place, in one line of tradition, and at one moment in its protean history. The first record of a ballad is not its original form but merely its earliest recorded form, and the recording of a ballad does not inhibit tradition from varying it subsequently into other shapes, because tradition preserves by re-creating rather than by exact reproduction.

Composition

Theories

      How ballads are composed and set afloat in tradition has been the subject of bitter quarrels among scholars. The so-called communal school, which was led by two American scholars F.B. Gummere (1855–1919) and G.L. Kittredge (Kittredge, George Lyman) (1860–1941), argued at first that ballads were composed collectively during the excitement of dance and song festivals. Under attack the communalists retreated to the position that although none of the extant ballads had been communally composed, the prototypical ballads that determined the style of the ballads had originated in this communal fashion. Their opponents were the individualists, who included the British men of letters W.J. Courthope (Courthope, William John) (1842–1917) and Andrew Lang (Lang, Andrew) (1844–1912) and the American linguist Louise Pound (1872–1958). They held that each ballad was the work of an individual composer, who was not necessarily a folk singer, tradition serving simply as the vehicle for the oral perpetuation of the creation. According to the widely accepted communal re-creation theory, put forward by the American collector Phillips Barry (1880–1937) and the scholar G.H. Gerould (1877–1953), the ballad is conceded to be an individual composition originally. This fact is considered of little importance because the singer is not expressing himself individually, but serving as the deputy of the public voice, and because a ballad does not become a ballad until it has been accepted by the folk community and been remolded by the inevitable variations of tradition into a communal product. Ballads have also been thought to derive from art songs, intended for sophisticated audiences, which happened to filter down to a folk level and become folk song. This view, though plausible in the case of certain folk lyrics, is inapplicable to the ballads, for if the ballads were simply miscellaneous castoffs, it would not be possible to discern so clearly in them a style that is unlike anything in sophisticated verse.

Technique and form

      Ballads are normally composed in two kinds of stanzas (stanza); the first consists of a couplet of lines each with four stressed syllables, and with an interwoven refrain:

But it would have made your heart right sair,

With a hey ho and a lillie gay

To see the bridegroom rive his haire.

As the primrose spreads so sweetly

      the second a stanza of alternating lines of four stresses and three stresses, the second and fourth lines rhyming:

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.

      Reference to the tunes show that the three-stress lines actually end in an implied fourth stress to match the pause in the musical phrase at these points. The interwoven refrain is a concession to the musical dimension of the ballad; it may be a set of nonsense syllables (Dillum down dillum, Fa la la la) or irrelevant rigmaroles of flowers or herbs. A few ballads have stanza-length burdens interspersed between the narrative stanzas, a technique borrowed from the medieval carols (carol). The lyrical and incantatory effect of refrains during the ballad performance is very appealing, but in cold print they often look ridiculous, which is perhaps why early collectors failed to note them. In the first example above, it will be noted that the gaiety of the refrain is at odds with the mood of the meaningful lines. Not infrequently the ballad stanza satisfies the music's insistence on lyrical flourishes by repeating textual phrases and lines:

So he ordered the grave to be opened wide,

And the shroud to be turned down;

And there he kissed her clay cold lips

Till the tears came trickling down, down, down,

Till the tears came trickling down

      The refrain is just one of the many kinds of repetition employed in ballads. Incremental repetition, already discussed, is the structural principle on which whole ballads (“The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” “Lord Randal”) are organized, and many other ballads contain long exchanges of similarly patterned phrases building cumulatively toward the denouement:

“Oh what will you leave to your father dear?”

“The silver-shod steed that brought me here.”

“What will you leave to your mother dear?”

“My velvet pall and my silken gear.”

“What will you leave to your brother John?”

“The gallows-tree to hang him on.”

      Any compressed narrative of sensational happenings told at a high pitch of feeling is bound to repeat words and phrases in order to accommodate the emotion that cannot be exhausted in one saying, a tendency that accounts for such stanzas as:

Then He says to His mother, “Oh: the withy [willow], oh:

the withy,

The bitter withy that causes me to smart, to

smart,

Oh: the withy, it shall be the very first tree

That perishes at the heart.”

      Much repetition in ballads is mnemonic as well as dramatic. Since ballads are performed orally, the hearer cannot turn back a page to recover a vital detail that slipped by in a moment of inattention. Crucial facts in narrative, therefore, are incised in the memory by skillful repetition; instructions given in a speech are exactly repeated when the singer reports the complying action; answers follow the form of the questions that elicited them.

      The exigencies of oral performance also account for the conventional stereotyped imagery of the ballads. For unlike the poet, who reaches for the individualistic, arresting figure of speech, the ballad singer seldom ventures beyond a limited stock of images and descriptive adjectives. Knights are always gallant, swords royal, water wan, and ladies gay. Whatever is red is as red as blood, roses, coral, rubies, or cherries; white is stereotyped as snow white, lily white, or milk white. Such conventions fall into place almost by reflex action, easing the strain on the singer's memory and allowing him to give his full attention to the manipulation of the story. The resulting bareness of verbal texture, however, is more than compensated for by the dramatic rhetoric through which the narrative is projected. In any case, complex syntax and richness of language are forbidden to texts meant to be sung, for music engages too much of the hearer's attention for him to untangle an ambitious construction or relish an original image. Originality indeed, like anything else that exalts the singer, violates ballad decorum, which insists that the singer remain impersonal.

Music

      A ballad is not technically a ballad unless it is sung; but though tunes and texts are dynamically interdependent, it is not unusual to find the same version of a ballad being sung to a variety of tunes of suitable rhythm and metre or to find the same tune (tune family) being used for several different ballads. And just as there are clusters of versions for most ballads, so a given ballad may have associated with it a family of tunes whose members appear to be versions of a single prototypical form.

      Ballad tunes are based on the modes (mode) rather than on the diatonic and chromatic scales that are used in modern music. Where chromaticism is detected in American folk music, the inflected tones are derived from black folk practice or from learned music. Of the six modes, the preponderance of folk tunes are Ionian, Dorian, or Mixolydian; Lydian and Phrygian tunes are rare. The folk music least affected by sophisticated conditioning does not avail itself of the full seven tones that compose each of the modal scales. Instead, it exhibits gapped scales, omitting either one of the tones (hexatonic) or two of them (pentatonic (pentatonic scale)). modulation sometimes occurs in a ballad from one mode to an adjacent mode.

      Most tunes consist of 16 bars with duple rhythm, or two beats per measure, prevailing slightly over triple rhythm. The tune, commensurate with the ballad stanza, is repeated as many times as there are stanzas. Unlike the “through-composed” art song, where the music is given nuances to correspond to the varying emotional colour of the content, the folk song affords little opportunity to inflect the contours of the melody. This limitation partly explains the impassive style of folk singing, Musical variation, however, is hardly less frequent than textual variation; indeed, it is almost impossible for a singer to perform a ballad exactly the same way twice. The stablest part of the tune occurs at the mid-cadence (the end of the second text line) and the final cadence (the end of the fourth line). The third phrase of the tune, corresponding to the third line of the stanza, proves statistically the most variable. Significantly, these notes happen to coincide with the rhyming words. The last note of the tune, the point of resolution and final repose, usually falls on the fundamental tone (i.e., keynote) of the scale; the mid-cadence falling normally a perfect fifth above the tonic or a perfect fourth below it. To make for singability, the intervals in the melodic progression seldom involve more than three degrees. And since the singer performs solo or plays the accompanying instrument himself, he need not keep rigidly to set duration or stress but may introduce grace notes to accommodate hypermetric syllables and lengthen notes for emphasis.

Types of balladry

      The traditional folk ballad, sometimes called the Child (Child, Francis J) ballad in deference to Francis Child, the scholar who compiled the definitive English collection, is the standard kind of folk ballad in English and is the type of balladry that this section is mainly concerned with. But there are peripheral kinds of ballads that must also be noticed in order to give a survey of balladry.

minstrel ballad

      Minstrels, the professional entertainers of nobles, squires, rich burghers, and clerics until the 17th century, should properly have had nothing to do with folk ballads, the self-created entertainment of the peasantry. Minstrels sometimes, however, affected the manner of folk song or remodelled established folk ballads. Child included many minstrel ballads in his collection on the ground that fragments of traditional balladry were embedded in them. The blatant style of minstrelsy marks these ballads off sharply from folk creations. In violation of the strict impersonality of the folk ballads, minstrels constantly intrude into their narratives with moralizing comments and fervent assurances that they are not lying at the very moment when they are most fabulous. The ministrels manipulate the story with coarse explicitness, begging for attention in a servile way, predicting future events in the story and promising that it will be interesting and instructive, shifting scenes obtrusively, reflecting on the characters' motives with partisan prejudice. Often their elaborate performances are parcelled out in clear-cut divisions, usually called fits or cantos, in order to forestall tedium and build up suspense by delays and piecemeal revelations. Several of the surviving minstrel pieces are poems in praise of such noble houses as the Armstrongs (“Johnie Armstrong”), the Stanleys (“The Rose of England”), and the Percys (“The Battle of Otterburn,” “The Hunting of the Cheviot,” “The Earl of Westmoreland”), doubtless the work of propagandists in the employ of these families. The older Robin Hood ballads are also minstrel propaganda, glorifying the virtues of the yeomanry, the small independent landowners of preindustrial England. The longer, more elaborate minstrel ballads were patently meant to be recited rather than sung.

broadside ballad

 Among the earliest products of the printing press were broadsheets about the size of handbills on which were printed the text of ballads. A crude woodcut often headed the sheet, and under the title it was specified that the ballad was to be sung to the tune of some popular air. Musical notation seldom appeared on the broadsides; those who sold the ballads in the streets and at country fairs sang their wares so that anyone unfamiliar with the tune could learn it by listening a few times to the balladmonger's rendition. From the 16th century until the end of the 19th century, broadsides, known also as street ballads, stall ballads, or slip songs, were a lively commodity, providing employment for a troop of hack poets. Before the advent of newspapers, the rhymed accounts of current events provided by the broadside ballads were the chief source of spectacular news. Every sensational public happening was immediately clapped into rhyme and sold on broadsheets. Few of the topical pieces long survived the events that gave them birth, but a good number of pathetic tragedies, such as “The Children in the Wood” and broadsides about Robin Hood, Guy of Warwick, and other national heroes, remained perennial favourites. Although the broadside ballad represents the adaptation of the folk ballad to the urban scene and middle class sensibilities, the general style more closely resembles minstrelsy, only with a generous admixture of vulgarized traits borrowed from book poetry. A few folk ballads appeared on broadsheets; many ballads, however, were originally broadside ballads the folk adapted.

Literary ballads

      The earliest literary imitations of ballads were modelled on broadsides, rather than on folk ballads. In the early part of the 18th century, Jonathan Swift (Swift, Jonathan), who had written political broadsides in earnest, adapted the style for several jocular bagatelles. Poets such as Swift, Matthew Prior, and William Cowper in the 18th century and Thomas Hood, W.M. Thackeray, and Lewis Carroll in the 19th century made effective use of the jingling metres, forced rhymes, and unbuttoned style for humorous purposes. Lady Wardlaw's “Hardyknute” (1719), perhaps the earliest literary attempt at a folk ballad, was dishonestly passed off as a genuine product of tradition. After the publication of Thomas Percy (Percy, Thomas)'s ballad compilation Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, ballad imitation enjoyed a considerable vogue, which properly belongs in the history of poetry rather than balladry.

Subject matter

The supernatural

      The finest of the ballads are deeply saturated in a mystical atmosphere imparted by the presence of magical (magic) appearances and apparatus. “The Wife of Usher's Well” laments the death of her children so unconsolably that they return to her from the dead as revenants; “Willie's Lady” cannot be delivered of her child because of her wicked mother-in-law's spells, an enchantment broken by a beneficent household spirit; “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry” begets upon an “earthly” woman a son, who, on attaining maturity, joins his seal father in the sea, there shortly to be killed by his mother's human husband; “Kemp Owyne” disenchants a bespelled maiden by kissing her despite her bad breath and savage looks. An encounter between a demon and a maiden occurs in “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight,” the English counterpart of the ballads known to the Dutch-Flemish as “Herr Halewijn,” to Germans as “Ulinger,” to Scandinavians as “Kvindemorderen” and to the French as “Renaud le Tueur de Femme.” In “The House Carpenter,” a former lover (a demon in disguise) persuades a wife to forsake husband and children and come away with him, a fatal decision as it turns out. In American and in late British tradition the supernatural tends to get worked out of the ballads by being rationalized: instead of the ghost of his jilted sweetheart appearing to Sweet William of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” as he lies in bed with his bride, it is rather the dead girl's image in a dream that kindles his fatal remorse. In addition to those ballads that turn on a supernatural occurrence, casual supernatural elements are found all through balladry.

Romantic tragedies

      The separation of lovers through a misunderstanding or the opposition of relatives is perhaps the commonest ballad story. “Barbara Allen” is typical: Barbara cruelly spurns her lover because of an unintentional slight; he dies of lovesickness, she of remorse. The Freudian (Freudian criticism) paradigm operates rigidly in ballads: fathers oppose the suitors of their daughters, mothers the sweethearts of their sons. Thus “The Douglas Tragedy”—the Danish “Ribold and Guldborg”—occurs when an eloping couple is overtaken by the girl's father and brothers or “Lady Maisry,” pregnant by an English lord, is burned by her fanatically Scottish brother. incest, frequent in ballads recorded before 1800 (“Lizie Wan,” “The Bonny Hind”), is shunned by modern tradition.

Romantic comedies

      The outcome of a ballad love affair is not always, though usually, tragic. But even when true love is eventually rewarded, such ballad heroines as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” and “Fair Annie,” among others, win through to happiness after such bitter trials that the price they pay seems too great. The course of romance runs hardly more smoothly in the many ballads, influenced by the cheap optimism of broadsides, where separated lovers meet without recognizing each other: the girl is told by the “stranger” of her lover's defection or death: her ensuing grief convinces him of her sincere love: he proves his identity and takes the joyful girl to wife. “The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington” is a classic of the type. Later tradition occasionally foists happy endings upon romantic tragedies: in the American “Douglas Tragedy” the lover is not slain but instead gets the irate father at his mercy and extorts a dowry from him. With marriage a consummation so eagerly sought in ballads, it is ironical that the bulk of humorous ballads deal with shrewish wives (“The Wife Wrapped in Wether's Skin”) or gullible cuckolds (“Our Goodman”).

crime

      Crime, and its punishment, is the theme of innumerable ballads: his sweetheart poisons “Lord Randal”; “Little Musgrave” is killed by Lord Barnard when he is discovered in bed with Lady Barnard, and the lady, too, is gorily dispatched. The murders of “Jim Fisk,” Johnny of “Frankie and Johnny,” and many other ballad victims are prompted by sexual jealousy. One particular variety of crime ballad, the “last goodnight (good-night)”, represents itself falsely to be the contrite speech of a criminal as he mounts the scaffold to be executed. A version of “Mary Hamilton” takes this form, which was a broadside device widely adopted by the folk. “Tom Dooley” and “Charles Guiteau,” the scaffold confession of the assassin of Pres. James A. Garfield, are the best known American examples.

Medieval romance

      Perhaps a dozen or so ballads derive from medieval romances. As in “Hind Horn” and “Thomas Rymer,” only the climactic scene is excerpted for the ballad. In general, ballads from romances have not worn well in tradition because of their unpalatable fabulous elements, which the modern folk apparently regard as childish. Thus “Sir Lionel” becomes in America “Bangum and the Boar,” a humorous piece to amuse children. Heterodox apocryphal (apocrypha) legends that circulated widely in the Middle Ages are the source of almost all religious ballads, notable “Judas,” “The Cherry-Tree Carol,” and “The Bitter Withy.” The distortion of biblical narrative is not peculiarly British: among others, the Russian ballads of Samson and Solomon, the Spanish “Pilgrim to Compostela” and the French and Catalonian ballads on the penance of Mary Magdalence reshape canonical stories radically.

Historical ballads

      Historical ballads date mainly from the period 1550–750, though a few, like “The Battle of Otterburn,” celebrate events of an earlier date, in this case 1388. “The Hunting of the Cheviot,” recorded about the same time and dealing with the same campaign, is better known in a late broadside version called “Chevy Chase.” The details in historical ballads are usually incorrect as to fact because of faulty memory or partisan alterations, but they are valuable in reflecting folk attitudes toward the events they imperfectly report. For example, neither “The Death of Queen Jane,” about one of the wives of Henry VIII, nor “The Bonny Earl of Murray” is correct in key details, but they accurately express the popular mourning for these figures. By far the largest number of ballads that can be traced to historical occurrences have to do with local skirmishes and matters of regional rather than national importance. The troubled border (border ballad) between England and Scotland in the 16th and early 17th century furnished opportunities for intrepid displays of loyalty, courage, and cruelty that are chronicled in such dramatic ballads as “Edom o Gordon,” “The Fire of Frendraught,” “Johnny Cock,” “Johnie Armstrong,” and “Hobie Noble.” Closely analogous to these are Spanish romances such as “The Seven Princes of Lara,” on wars between Moors and Christians.

Disaster

      Sensational shipwrecks, plagues, train wrecks, mine explosions—all kinds of shocking acts of God and man—were regularly chronicled in ballads, a few of which remained in tradition, probably because of some special charm in the language or the music. The shipwreck that lies in the background of one of the most poetic of all ballads “Sir Patrick Spens” cannot be fixed, but “The Titanic,” “Casey Jones,” “The Wreck on the C & O,” and “The Johnstown Flood” are all circumstantially based on actual events.

Outlaws and badmen

      Epic and saga heroes (hero) figure prominently in Continental balladries, notable examples being the Russian Vladimir, the Spanish Cid Campeador, the Greek Digenes Akritas, and the Danish Tord of Havsgaard and Diderik. This kind of hero never appears in English and Scottish ballads. But the outlaw hero of the type of the Serbian Makro Kraljević (Marko Kraljević) or the Danish Marsk Stig is exactly matched by the English Robin Hood, who is the hero of some 40 ballads, most of them of minstrel or broadside provenance. His chivalrous style and generosity to the poor was imitated by later ballad highwaymen in “Dick Turpin,” “Brennan on the Moor,” and “Jesse James.” “Henry Martyn” and “Captain Kidd” were popular pirate ballads, but the most widely sung was “The Flying Cloud,” a contrite “goodnight” warning young men to avoid the curse of piracy. The fact that so many folk heroes are sadistic bullies (“Stagolee”), robbers (“Dupree”), or pathological killers (“Sam Bass,” “ Billy the Kid”) comments on the folk's hostile attitude toward the church, constabulary, banks, and railroads. The kindly, law-abiding, devout, enduring steel driver “John Henry” is a rarity among ballad heroes.

Occupational ballads (work song)

      A large section of balladry, especially American, deals with the hazards of such occupations as seafaring (“The Greenland Whale Fishery”), lumbering (“The Jam on Gerry's Rock”), mining (“The Avondale Mine Disaster”), herding cattle (“Little Joe the Wrangler”), and the hardships of frontier life (“The Arkansaw Traveler”). But men in these occupations sang ballads also that had nothing to do with their proper work: “The Streets of Laredo,” for example, is known in lumberjack and soldier versions as well as the usual cowboy lament version, and the pirate ballad “The Flying Cloud” was much more popular in lumbermen's shanties than in forecastles.

chronology

      Singing stories in song, either stories composed for the occasion out of a repertory of traditional motifs or phrases or stories preserved by memory and handed down orally, is found in most primitive cultures. The ballad habit thus is unquestionably very ancient. But the ballad genre itself could not have existed in anything like its present form before about 1100. “Judas,” the oldest example found in Francis James Child (Child, Francis J)'s exhaustive collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), dates from 1300, but until the 17th century ballad records are sparse indeed. As an oral art, the ballad does not need to be written down to be performed or preserved; in any case, many of the carriers of the ballad tradition are illiterate and could not make use of a written and notated ballad. The few early ballads' records survived accidentally, due to some monk's, minstrel's, or antiquary's fascination with rustic pastimes.

      The precise date of a ballad, therefore, or even any particular version of a ballad, is almost impossible to determine. In fact, to ask for the date of a folk ballad is to show that one misunderstands the peculiar nature of balladry. As remarked earlier, the first recording of a ballad must not be assumed to be the ballad's original form; behind each recorded ballad can be one detected the working of tradition upon some earlier form, since a ballad does not become a ballad until it has run a course in tradition. Historical ballads would seem on the surface to be easily datable, but their origins are usually quite uncertain. The ballad could have arisen long after the events it describes, basing itself, as do the Russian ballads of the Kievan cycle and the Spanish ballads about the Cid, on chronicles or popular legends. It is also likely that many historical ballads developed from the revamping of earlier ballads on similar themes through the alteration of names, places, and local details.

Albert B. Friedman Ed.

Additional Reading

F.J. Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vol. (1882–98), is the canon of traditional balladry; the tunes for these are supplied in B.H. Bronson (ed.), Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 vol. (1959–72). Important broadside collections include The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. by W. Chappell and J.W. Ebsworth, 9 vol. (1871–99); and The Pepys Ballads, ed. by H.E. Rollins, 8 vol. (1929–32). See also The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry, XVth–XXth Century, ed. by V. de Sola Pinto and A.E. Rodway (1957); C.M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (1966); T.P. Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America, rev. ed. (1963); and G.M. Laws, Native American Balladry, rev. ed. (1964). Ballad criticism and scholarship are analyzed in S.B. Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (1930); D.K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (1959); A.B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (1961); C.J. Sharp, English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907); G.H. Gerould, Ballad of Tradition (1932); and M.J.C. Hodgart, Ballads (1950). A.T. Quillercouch (ed.), The Oxford Book of Ballads (1910, reissued 1951); M. Leach (ed.), The Ballad Book (1955); and A.B. Friedman (ed.), Folk Ballads of the English Speaking World (1956), are the standard anthologies.

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