n.

1. 1. A narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung, consisting of simple stanzas and usually having a refrain.
   2. The music for such a poem.
2. A popular song especially of a romantic or sentimental nature.

[Middle English balade, poem or song in stanza form, from Old French ballade, from Old Provençal balada, song sung while dancing, from balar, to dance, from Late Latin ballāre, to dance. See ball².]

balladic bal·lad'ic (bə-lăd'ĭk, bă-) adj.

A strophic folksong with a strong narrative element, in stanzas of four (or more) lines, normally without melodic repetition within a stanza. F.J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) contains 305; the tradition is also strong in some other European countries, notably Denmark. A special category was the English ‘broadside ballad’, originating in the 16th century and so called because the texts were printed on large folio sheets (broadsides). The tradition was transported to North America and resulted in the first printed sheet music there, commercial ballads, to be sung to a tune already familiar to the purchaser. Such ballads have remained an element in American popular music.

As a 19th-century art form, the ballad was cultivated in Germany in settings for voice and piano of narrative poems, often imitations or translations of traditional English ballads. One of the earliest significant ballad composers, J. R. Zumsteeg, served as a model for Schubert and Loewe, who in turn influenced Schumann, Brahms, Wolf and others. In Victorian England and in the USA the word ‘ballad’ was used for any kind of sentimental song, often performed in an opera (e.g. Bishop's ‘Home, sweet home’) or at a ‘ballad concert’.

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ballad, a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four‐stress and three‐stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming (see ballad metre); but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six‐line stanzas. Appearing in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages, ballads flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onward. Since the 18th century, educated poets outside the folk‐song tradition—notably Coleridge and Goethe— have written imitations of the popular ballad's form and style: Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) is a celebrated example.

For more information on ballad, visit Britannica.com.

Folklorists view ballads as a subdivision of folk song, whereas literary scholars are more likely to treat them as a subgenre of poetry. The word ‘ballad’ is highly ambiguous, but, except in the specialist sense of broadside ballad, folklorists usually use ‘ballad’ to refer to the ‘traditional ballads’ included in collections starting with Thomas Percy's Reliques of Early English Poetry (1765) and later identified and collected together by F. J. Child in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 volumes, 1882-98). Percy provided the first substantial source of ballad material for both scholar and poet, which became enormously influential in literary circles. Similarly, it is difficult to overstate the influence which Child's collection had over the field of ballad studies. His collection of 305 pieces rapidly became regarded as a closed canon and until recently few dared to question it. It is unfortunate that Child died before he could write the major essays which he planned to accompany the texts, as his criteria for inclusion now appear inconsistent, and instead of trying to construct a definition against which particular items can be measured, many later scholars have attempted to arrive at a definition which includes all the pieces in Child's work. They have thus largely failed, and have had to be content with description rather than definition. Nevertheless, the rule-of-thumb definition that a ballad is a ‘narrative folk-song’ is a useful starting-point. According to Richmond, the ballad

is usually anonymous, it concentrates on a single episode, it begins in media res, it is dramatic in its narrative structure, and it is impersonal (objective) in its telling. Moreover, it is always stanzaic, either seven- or eight-stress rhymed couplets or quatrains rhyming a, b, c, b, and generally alternates light and heavy stresses in each line. In addition, a repetition of words, phrases, and stanzas is common, not only in individual ballads but also in the genre as a whole … (Richmond, 1989: p. xx).

The corpus includes ballads on a range of topics, which can be roughly classified by subject: Robin Hood ballads, Border ballads (Hunting the Cheviot, Battle of Otterburn), Tragic ballads (Sir Patrick Spens, Cruel Brother, Lord Randal), Enchantment and Fairy ballads (Tam Lin, Thomas Rhymer), and one or two Christian carols/ballads (Cherry Tree Carol, St Stephen and Herod). For many of them the only evidence for their traditional status is in the manuscript collections of the past, while others such as Barbara Allen, The Gypsy Laddie, Lord Bateman, and Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender remained extremely popular and were noted time and again by 19th- and 20th-century folk-song collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ballad scholarship has embraced many analytical perspectives, following the intellectual fashions of the day, including various linguistic, psychological, and literary approaches, and engendered a number of its own bitter controversies, starting with Ritson's acerbic attack on Percy's editorial standards, and continuing with the ‘ballad war’ in the early 20th century between the communalists and the individualists who argued over origins and early development (see Wilgus for a summary).

The narrative nature of the ballad ensures that scholars often find it difficult to adhere to national boundaries, and, as Child amply illustrates, the British tradition can be usefully compared with those of other European countries, especially from Scandinavia, while Scotland is generally agreed to have a stronger ballad tradition than England. Much of the best ballad criticism and analysis has emanated from North America, but so much of ballad scholarship came from literary and linguistic quarters that the musical side of balladry was relatively neglected. The indefatigable champion of ballad tunes was Bertrand H. Bronson, who, from the 1950s onwards, attempted to redress the balance with a series of articles and books, culminating in the four-volume set entitled The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959-72) which stands beside Child's collection as the bedrock of scholarship. Bronson was fond of asking, ‘When is a ballad not a ballad?—When it has no tune’.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• W. Edson Richmond, Ballad Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography (1989)
• D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (1959)
• MacEdward Leach and Tristram P. Coffin, The Critics and the Ballad (1961)
• David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (1972)

[OFr. balade]

The popular composition of anonymous ballads began after the 12th century in many countries in Western Europe, including the Celtic-speaking ones. ‘Ballad’ in Modern Irish is bailéad; Scottish Gaelic duanag, diminutive of duan: song, cf. òran: song, laoidh: verse, song, luinneag: ditty; Manx bannag; Welsh baled, balad; Bre. gwerz.

A ballad is a short narrative set to song. A folk ballad is generally short and simple, telling a dramatic story using dialogue and action. American folk ballads tend to rhyme and to be divided into stanzas. The ballad is an enduring musical form and often the first type of song children hear, since many lullabies are ballads. The earliest known American ballads are based on European models, some of which date to the late Middle Ages. American ballads often glorify cowboys, lumberjacks, and other working-class people as opposed to European ballads, which tend to focus on the highborn. (A recent example is singer Elton John's tribute, written upon the death of Princess Diana, "Candle in the Wind 1997.")

Many American ballads are also based on news events. There are numerous versions of "Stackalee" (or "Stagolee"), which tells about an actual murder said to have taken place in St. Louis in 1895. While all the versions tell the story somewhat differently, they have in common that "Stagalee, he was a bad man," a theme that runs through many ballads, especially those innovated in prisons, bars, and work camps. This tradition was revived in 1973 when singer-songwriter Jim Croce had a hit song with "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown." More recent ballads have used historical events to promote patriotic fervor. In 1966, during the Vietnam War, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler had a top forty radio success with "Ballad of the Green Berets," and almost immediately after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, country singer Alan Jackson's song, "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," went to the top of the country music charts.

Ballads often skip expository material and focus on a particular moment in time, such as the dying words of a young cowboy in "The Streets of Laredo," or in more recent times, the moment at which a woman walks down the street in Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" (1964).

The first collection of ballads published in America was compiled by Francis James Child in a five-volume work, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883–1898). Most early American ballads are variations on the 305 types defined by Child. The early American "Fatal Flower Garden" is based on a ballad identified by Child as "Sir Hugh." The original song, which tells of a gruesome child murder, dates as far back as 1255. Few early ballads have a definitive version because they were often sung by unlettered people who did not write them down. In their important 1934 work, American Ballads and Folk Songs, John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax provide twenty-five different categories of songs, many with alternative versions of a particular ballad. Their categories include "Working on the Railroad," "Songs from Southern Chain Gangs," "Negro Bad Men," "Cowboy Songs," "The Miner," "War and Soldiers," "White Spirituals," and "Negro Spirituals." In the first edition of the Dictionary of American History (1976), John A. Lomax wrote that American ballads tend to follow the pattern of the come-all-ye's and are peopled with working-class characters. Undoubtedly the most popular of indigenous types are the occupational ballads, the bad-man ballad, the murder ballad, and the vulgar or bawdy ballad. As the English loved Robin Hood because he took from the rich to give to the poor, so the American folksinger has commemorated Jesse James. Probably more than anyone else, the Lomaxes are responsible for recording America's folk heritage, including one of the greatest repositories of its ballads, Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly. They wrote that among the ballads they recorded, beginning in 1932, were many that were too bawdy for print; thus their books often contain sanitized versions of the original work.

The singer Pete Seeger has also been a proponent of recording and singing American ballads in order to keep the songs alive. The son of a musicologist, Seeger wrote his own songs ("Turn, Turn, Turn") and popularized those of other artists (for example, Leadbelly's "Good-night Irene").

While Seeger and the Lomaxes collected primarily folk ballads, the form has endured in nearly every category of American music including rock, pop, rhythm and blues, jazz, religious, and perhaps especially, country and western. Pop ballads have been sung by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan ("The Times They Are A'changin") and Billy Joel ("Piano Man"). Ray Charles combined blues music with country in his influential ballads (including "I Can't Stop Loving You"). The list of country and western ballads is enormous and some of the titles are an entertainment in themselves.

Poets, including the twentieth-century Anglo-American W. H. Auden, also wrote poems in a ballad form ("If I Could Tell You," "O Where are You Going"). Some of these works were published as broadsides rather than as music.

Bibliography

Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan, 1934.

———. Folk Song U.S.A. New York: New American Library, 1947.

Seeger, Pete. American Favorite Ballads: Tunes and Songs As Sung by Pete Seeger. Edited by Irwin Silber and Ethel Raim. New York: Oak Publications, 1961.

Smith, Harry, ed. Anthology of American Folk Music. Smithsonian Folkways compact disks (6).

—Rebekah Presson Mosby

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A simple narrative song, or a narrative poem suitable for singing. The ballad usually has a short stanza, such as:

There are twelve months in all the year,

As I hear many men say,

But the merriest month in all the year

Is the merry month of May.

A simple narrative song, or, alternatively, a narrative poem suitable for singing. (See under “Conventions of Written English.”)

1. A simple song. 2. A song that tells astory.

A short narrative poem with stanzas of two or four lines and usually a refrain. The story of a ballad can originate from a wide range of subject matter but most frequently deals with folklore or popular legends. They are written in straightforward verse, seldom with detail, but always with graphic simplicity and force. Most ballads are suitable for singing and, while sometimes varied in practice, are generally written in ballad meter, i.e., alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with the last words of the second and fourth lines rhyming.

IN BRIEF: A poem or song that tells a story.

There is one long ballad sung about how the castle was saved.

Tutor's tip: A "ballad" is a romantic song that tells a story, while a "ballade" is a verse form or piano composition.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - ballade

Nederlands (Dutch)
ballade

Français (French)
n. - (Mus) romance, (Littérat) ballade

Deutsch (German)
n. - Ballade

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μπαλάντα

Italiano (Italian)
ballata

Português (Portuguese)
n. - balada (f)

Русский (Russian)
баллада

Español (Spanish)
n. - balada, romance

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - ballad

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
民谣, 民歌, 歌, 叙事歌谣, 情歌

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 民謠, 民歌, 歌, 敘事歌謠, 情歌

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 민요

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 民謡, バラッド, 俗謡

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) قصه شعريه, أغنيه روائيه, مديحه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮בלדה, שיר‬

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