by Nick Somoski

Created on: January 01, 2011   Last Updated: January 02, 2011

The ballad has been a very influential part of music and poetry throughout the past. Throughout past the ballad has been used to tell stories in a poetic form. They have often been used in songs, and have a tendency to retain a musical quality to them.

The basic form for ballads is iambic heptameter, and they often contain rhymes and dialogues. The typical action is most often described in first person. While the ballad is most often written with a romantic or sentimental theme, there tends to be many other subjects explored, including adventure, war, love, death, violence, betrayal, and the supernatural.

Ballad poets ordinarily draw their materials from community life, from local and national history, and from legends and folklore. There are three main types of ballads, folk ballads, literary ballads, and broadside ballads. Each ballad has its own characteristics and defining attributes.

–Folk Ballad 

In a folk ballad, a story is told as an impersonal narrative primarily through dialogue and action. They often relay a tragic theme with sensational events. A ballad usually deals with a single episode, with trivial imagery or background information, and nearly no character development. Many ballads use refrains or incremental repetition. In that repetition, the same phrase is repeated in variations over the course of the poem.

–Literary Ballad

The literary ballad is nearly the complete opposite of the folk and broadside ballads. It is a sophisticated form of ballad rather than a popular form. Different from the anonymous, verbally transmitted folk ballad, the literary ballad is a written piece by a single poet, who purposely chooses the types of themes found in folk ballads and imitates their form. While folk ballads are meant to be sung, literary ballads are to be read.

–Broadside Ballad

The broadside ballad was named so because of how it was printed on a single sheet of paper. It was a written form of a ballad, but it was a popular instead of a “sophisticated literary” form. The broadside ballad was modeled after the folk ballads, sharing many of the characteristics of being “popular”. Much like the folk ballad, it made use of colloquial language and rough rhyme. The main difference was that the verse in the broadside ballad tended to be more doggerel than that of the folk ballad. It was essentially an early version of tabloid journalism – rhymed accounts of remarkable news events.

There are many sub-ballads that fall under each of these categories. Murder ballads are a broadside ballad, told from the killers point of view. Boarder ballads are a folk ballad dealing with raids, feuds, and seduction from both sides. Opera ballads and jazz ballads are two different styles written in different meters.

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