Ballad

Somewhat artificially, scholars divide the English-language ballads into traditional ballads, broadside ballads, and native ballads of former British colonies. The traditional ballads are also known as Child ballads after the 19th-century American scholar Francis James Child, who, in his book The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vol., 1882-1898), compiled what he considered a canon of 305 ballads the histories of which date from or nearly from the Middle Ages. Although only eight ballads can be traced in manuscript or print to the Middle Ages, and although Child missed some ballads such as “The Bitter Withy” and “Father Grumble” and ignored bawdy ballads such as “The Sea-Crab”, his canon has been so widely accepted that to call a ballad a Child ballad is to say that it represents the oldest British tradition. “The Sweet Trinity” (commonly sung in America as “The Golden Vanity”), “The Elfin Knight” (commonly sung in America as “Scarborough Fair”), and “Barbara Allen” are all Child ballads.

Broadside ballads are those that appeared, normally without music, on the broadsheets that printers sold as a form of early newspaper to capitalize on hangings, battles, and other sensationalism. A printer who ran out of copy might well put an old ballad on the sheet. Soon ballad printing became big business, and printers hired ballad composers (the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith once worked at this) and itinerant singers to write and hawk songs. Many of these songs, such as “The Broken Token”, “The Lexington Murder”, and “Brennan on the Moor”, became popular enough to enter the repertoires of folksingers. Broadside ballads flourished in Britain from as early as the 1500s until they were superseded by modern songbooks, sheet music, and records.

Wherever the British went—to Australia, Canada, America—they took their traditional and broadside ballads with them. In the new countries, ballads on local topics were soon composed by local singers and printers, so that a canon of native Australian, Canadian, and American balladry grew up. Representative of the US contribution are “John Henry “, “Frankie and Johnny”, “Young Charlotte”, and “Springfield Mountain”. A few US ballads, such as “The Texas Rangers”, were even transported back to the British Isles.

Folk ballads have been collected, edited, and studied by enthusiasts and scholars for centuries. In fact, so much interest has been generated that the folk ballad has given birth to a major poetic form, the literary ballad. Distinguished writers—such as the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Algernon Swinburne, and A. E. Housman, the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many others—have left a large number of English-language poems that imitate both the traditional and the broadside ballad, while developing the form in fresh ways.