Types of Folk Song: Ballads
Types of Folk Song
The categories and definitions given here are intended simply as a handy beginners guide – they are neither authoritative nor definitive statements and it should be noted that some songs might be in multiple categories – for instance you could have a comic broadside ballad, or a custom song with a chorus mentioning real historical figures. These notes are intended only as an introduction to terms and ideas.
Ballads
Ballads are a type of narrative folk song, often having a large number of verses accompanied by a structurally simple tune and frequently recounting folk stories or historic events (with varying degrees of historical accuracy) in four line stanzas. It is a story telling form found across Europe but with strong links to Scandinavian and Germanic storytelling traditions. They fall into a number of categories – these may include (among others) love stories, humorous tales, Robin Hood ballads and songs of historical events. The latter were often found as broadsides. During the 18th and 19th centuries there was a wave of popularity for ballads that saw the traditional songs and stories influencing the literary writers of the time and many poets experimented with this form of storytelling.
Barbara Allen, a version collected by Ella Bull, Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, in the Lucy Broadwood collection.
Border Ballads
There is a strong tradition of these type of songs from the borders between England and Scotland (Lowland Scotland and Northumberland) and these are often know as border ballads for this reason.
The popularity of all things Scottish, spearheaded by writers of the Romantic period including Sir Walter Scott, helped to develop a popular appetite for these types of songs and poems and helped to encourage the later collectors of traditional folk songs.
Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of The Scottish Border
Broadside Ballads
Also known as broadsheet ballads, these were in many ways the forerunners of our modern newspapers (we still talk about broadsheet newspapers today). Printed on large sheets of cheap paper in black ink (17th century ballads are often referred to as blackletter ballads). They became hugely popular following the introduction of the printing press and were mass-produced to tie into any occasion, from journalistically recounting the ‘facts’ of a battle, a murder, a wondrous event or sometimes just reprinting a version of a popular traditional song or ballad.
They reached their highest popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries when hundreds of thousands were sold. Many of the songs that have been collected in oral culture may have originated as broadside, printed ballads. A New Song on The Leeds Election from the Frank Kidson Collection
