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The ballad is a 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 not yet 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 (i.e.,
divided into stanzas); the Russian ballads known as bylinyand almost all Balkan ballads are unrhymed and unstrophic; and, though the romances
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. (see also strophe,
romancero)
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. Focussing 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
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.
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. (see also
oral literature)
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 (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
(1842-1917) and Andrew Lang
(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. (see also
individualist school)
Ballads are normally composed in two
kinds of stanzas; 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.
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.
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 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. (see also
tune family)
Ballad tunes are based on the modes
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). Modulation
sometimes occurs in a ballad from one mode to an adjacent mode. (see also
pentatonic scale)
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.
The traditional folk
ballad, sometimes called the Child 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. (see also
"English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, The")
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.
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.
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, 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's ballad compilation Reliques
of Ancient English Poetryin 1765, ballad imitation enjoyed a considerable vogue, which properly
belongs in the history of poetry rather than balladry.
The finest of the ballads are deeply
saturated in a mystical atmosphere imparted by the presence of magical
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.
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 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. (see also
desire, Freudian
criticism)
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, 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," 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.
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
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 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 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. (see also
border ballad )
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.
Epic and saga heroes
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 Kraljevic
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.
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. (see also
work song)
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'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.
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