Ballad singer

“ It would be more than rash, however, to imagine that ballads did not live and grow and spread in the obscure but fertile ground of the popular fancy and the popular memory, because they did not crop up in the contemporary{25} printed literature, and were overlooked by the dry-as-dust chroniclers of the time. Nor is it a paradox to say that a ballad may be older, by ages, than the hero and the deeds that it seems to celebrate. ”

“ It really means a dance-song. For ballads were at first written to be sung to dances—slow, shuffling, balancing dances such as one may still see in out-of-the-way places in Brittany.
These ballads often had a chorus or refrain in which every one joined. But by degrees the refrain was dropped and the dancing too. Now we think of a ballad as a simple story told in verse. Sometimes it is merry, but more often it is sad.
The ballads were not made for grand folk. They were not made to be sung in courts and halls. They were made for the common people, and sometimes at least they were made by them. ”

“ English ballads, as we have them in print to-day, took form in a far later and more sophisticated period than those just suggested; yet even thus our ballads stand nearest of anything in our literature to the primitive poetry that was born out of the social life of the community rather than made by the solitary thought of the artist. Even so comparatively small a group as that comprehended within this volume shows how truly the ballad is the parent stock of all other poetic varieties. In the ballad of plain narrative, as The Hunting of the Cheviot, the epic is hinted. ”

“ No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and ancient superstition have a prominent place—the ballads of Myth and Marvel—have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may be said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as well as of those whose theme is the passion and tragedy of love. ”

“ In singing the former she exhibits a most winning naïveté, enters wholly into the spirit of the song, and with a full, pleasing voice, impresses deeply its melody and meaning upon the hearts of her hearers, thus exhibiting the highest kind of lyric eloquence. As a singer, then, of ballads alone, she would take high rank in the musical profession, even if she did not excel—it has been seen that she does—in the rendering of songs of a more technical character. ”

“ All the men but one leaned back upon the settles or forward upon the tables, their hands on their tankards, watching the one who sang a ballad—a ballad known to them so well that they seemed not to listen, but simply to let the melody surge about them and provoke what thoughts it would. ”

“ This was more marked in England than in Scotland. Indeed, the question has been raised as to whether there ever existed a class of Englishmen who were both ballad-singers and ballad-makers. This was one of the points at issue between those eminent antiquarians, Bishop Percy and Mr. Ritson, in the eighteenth century. Dr. Percy had defined the English minstrels as an "order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sung to the harp the verses which they themselves composed." ”

“ The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. ”

“ Passing over the obsolete sense of "a popular song specially celebrating or scurrilously attacking some person or institution," we may note that Dr Johnson calls a ballad "a song," and quotes a statement from Watts that it once "signified a solemn and sacred song as well as a trivial, when Solomon's Song was called the 'The Ballad of Ballads,' but now it is applied to nothing but trifling verse."
Ballad-collectors, however, have never strictly regarded any one of these definitions, and to me their catholicity seems worthy of imitation. ”

“ The balladist is 'a voice and nothing more'—a voice singing in a chorus of others, in which only faintly and uncertainly we sometimes fancy we can make out the note, but rarely anything of the person or history, of the individual singer. ”

“ But they are critics of poetry and therefore entitled to the use of escapes and evasions denied to the author of a text-book. Let me therefore say with no thought of originality in the saying, that a ballad is a story told in verse. Usually it is told in a sequence of quatrains, with one rhyme to a stanza, and usually the line is the iambic heptameter—or rather the stanza consists of two iambic tetrameters and two iambic trimeters. But this form is not inevitable; the only thing inevitable about a ballad is that it shall be a story. ”

“ In it the song of the river has been wedded to its story 'like perfect music unto noble words.' It is indeed the voice of Yarrow, chiding, imploring, lamenting; a voice 'most musical, most melancholy.' A ballad minstrel with a master-touch upon the chords of passion and pathos, with a feeling for dramatic intensity of effect that Nature herself must have taught him, must have left us these wondrous pictures of the quarrel, hot and sudden ”

“ The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like the epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular—not to say plebeian—in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti, are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry." The ballad revival has not been an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. ”

“ Furthermore, the ballad is not the ballade. The ballade is a highly artificial form of verse, French in origin, consisting, as a rule, of three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoi, with only three rhymes in all twenty-eight lines. People with a taste for untra-modern spelling sometimes label these productions "ballads" instead of "ballades," and other people sometimes try to give their ballads an archaic flavor by labeling them "ballades." Both practices are utterly unjustifiable. A ballade is no more a ballad than a sonnet is a quatrain. ”

“ There is a philosophical propriety, too, in beginning poetic study with ballad lore, for the ballad is the germ of all poem varieties.
This volume attempts to present such a selection from the old ballads as shall represent them fairly in their three main classes,—those derived from superstition, whether fairy-lore, witch-lore, ghost-lore, or demon-lore; those derived from tradition, Scotch and English; and those derived from romance and from domestic life in general. The Scottish ballads, because of their far superior poetic value, are found here in greater number than the English. ”

“ In writing a ballad the secrets of success are definiteness of aim, directness of execution, and singleness of idea. The language must be simple, but so vigorous that every word tells; the metre must also be simple, but the versification demands a musical swing, a rush of rhyme, the talent for which is rare. To smell of the lamp is fatal to the ballad ”

“ And
therefore, if I wished to collect the ballads of the future, the songs
which will endure into the next century (if there is any song in
the next century) , I should not rake through the contemporary poets, in
the hope of finding gems of lasting brilliance. No. I should go to the
music-halls. I should listen to the sort of thing they sing when the
faded lady with the high bust steps forward and shouts, "Now then, boys,
all together!"
Unless you can write the words "Now then, boys, all together", at the
top of a ballad, it is not really a ballad at all. ”

“ Within them such literary tact and peasant-lore as you possess—and you cannot have too much—will infallibly detect the origin of a given ballad. So much as that, at least, is involved in the very nature of literature. A ballad—any ballad—was either written up to the height of his own powers by an original poet (a Burns, a Clare) , or written down to the auditory’s capacity, which is the way of the hack, or professional minstrel. ”

“ One is that neither literary men nor mere garreteers and makers of street ballads appear, about 1719-1730, to have been capable of recapturing the simplicity and charm of the old ballad style, at its best, or anything near its best. ”

“ Then suddenly, down the
street, that tune echoed. And they came marching, and marching, and
marching. And they were all so happy.
So happy.
VII
"Tipperary" is a true ballad, which is why it is included in this book.
So is "John Brown's Body". They were not written as ballads but they
have been promoted to that proud position by popular vote. ”

“ In the reactions against sophisticated poetry which set in from lime to time, the popular ballad—the true folk-song—has often been exalted at the expense of other forms of verse. It is idle to attempt to arrange the various forms of poetry in an order of absolute values; it is enough that each has its own quality, and, therefore, its own value. The drama, the epic, the ballad, the lyric, each strikes its note in the complete expression of human emotion and experience. ”

“ Modern poets have, in several instances, written ballads of striking picturesqueness and power, but as unlike the ballad of popular origin as the world of to-day is unlike the world in which "Chevy Chase" was first sung. These modern ballads are not necessarily better or worse than their predecessors; but they are necessarily different. It is idle to exalt the wild flower at the expense of the garden flower; each has its fragrance, its beauty, its sentiment; and the world is wide! ”

“ Romantic ballads, like popular songs, are preserved in a number of variations, for they were sung again and again to suit the modified taste of succeeding ages. Many romantic ballads retain much that is pre-Christian in disposition and sentiment. The finest collection of romantic ballads during recent times was made by Child, [24] who included the fireside versions of ballads that have come down to us through nursery literature. Child puts forward the opinion that where we are in possession of a romantic and a fireside version of the same ballad, the latter is a late and degraded survival. ”

“ A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, whose descendants are still in the land, whose home is a recognisable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of early poetry—the ballad, the song of the people ”

“ Is it too much to believe that in our older ballads we hear the echoes of the voices—it may be the very words—of the old bards, the harpers and the minstrels, who sang in the ears of princes and people as far back as history can carry us? We know, by experience of other lands and races, from Samoa to Sicily, that are still in their earlier or later ballad-age, that the making of ballads is almost as old as the making of war or of love—that it long precedes letters, to say nothing of the printed page. ”

“ To-day songs of great beauty are being constantly produced, and appreciated at their true worth. The art, too, of ballad-singing has immensely improved, as those whose memories can carry them back thirty years gratefully recognise, when they hear such past-masters of their craft as Madame Clara Butt and Mr. ”

“ The resemblance is of the most distant, and what there is must be regarded as casual. The same of the Finnish 'Kojoins Sohn,' Schröter, Finnische Runen, p. 114, 115; 'Kojosen Poika,' Lönnrot, Kanteletar, p. 279.
In places where a ballad has once been known, the story will often be remembered after the verses have been wholly or partly forgotten, and the ballad will be resolved into a prose tale, retaining, perhaps, some scraps of verse, and not infrequently taking up new matter, or blending with other traditions. Naturally enough, a ballad and an equivalent tale sometimes exist side by side. ”

“ The verse tale is shorter and likely to be less dignified and serious than the metrical romance. The stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Burns's Tam O'Shanter, may serve as examples.
The ballad is a narrative poem, usually rather short and in such form as to be sung. It is distinguished from a song by the fact that it tells a story. Popular or folk ballads are ancient and of unknown authorship—handed down by word of mouth and varied by the transmitters. Artistic ballads are imitations, by known poets, of traditional ballads. ”

“ Begging the question, that poetry can be produced by such a body, this poetry is naturally of a concrete and narrative character, and is previous to the poetry of art. ‘Therefore,’ says Professor Child, ‘while each ballad will be idiosyncratic, it will not be an expression of the personality of individuals, but of a collective sympathy; and the fundamental characteristic of popular ballads is therefore the absence of subjectivity and self-consciousness. ”

“ A Ballad History is welcome to childhood, from its rhymes, its high colouring, and its aptness to memory. As we grow into boyhood, the violent passions, the vague hopes, the romantic sorrow of patriot ballads are in tune with our fitful and luxuriant feelings. In manhood we prize the condensed narrative, the grave firmness, the critical art, and the political sway of ballads. And in old age they are doubly dear; the companions and reminders of our life, the toys and teachers of our children and grand-children. Every generation finds its account in them. ”