Composition

Theories

How ballads are composed and set afloat in tradition has been the subject of bitter quarrels among scholars. The so-called communal school, which was led by two American scholars F.B. Gummere (1855–1919) and G.L. Kittredge (1860–1941), argued at first that ballads were composed collectively during the excitement of dance and song festivals. Under attack the communalists retreated to the position that although none of the extant ballads had been communally composed, the prototypical ballads that determined the style of the ballads had originated in this communal fashion. Their opponents were the individualists, who included the British men of letters W.J. Courthope (1842–1917) and Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and the American linguist Louise Pound (1872–1958). They held that each ballad was the work of an individual composer, who was not necessarily a folk singer, tradition serving simply as the vehicle for the oral perpetuation of the creation. According to the widely accepted communal re-creation theory, put forward by the American collector Phillips Barry (1880–1937) and the scholar G.H. Gerould (1877–1953), the ballad is conceded to be an individual composition originally. This fact is considered of little importance because the singer is not expressing himself individually, but serving as the deputy of the public voice, and because a ballad does not become a ballad until it has been accepted by the folk community and been remolded by the inevitable variations of tradition into a communal product. Ballads have also been thought to derive from art songs, intended for sophisticated audiences, which happened to filter down to a folk level and become folk song. This view, though plausible in the case of certain folk lyrics, is inapplicable to the ballads, for if the ballads were simply miscellaneous castoffs, it would not be possible to discern so clearly in them a style that is unlike anything in sophisticated verse.

Technique and form

Ballads are normally composed in two kinds of stanzas; the first consists of a couplet of lines each with four stressed syllables, and with an interwoven refrain:

But it would have made your heart right sair,
With a hey ho and a lillie gay
To see the bridegroom rive his haire.
As the primrose spreads so sweetly

the second a stanza of alternating lines of four stresses and three stresses, the second and fourth lines rhyming:

There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o’er the sea.

Reference to the tunes show that the three-stress lines actually end in an implied fourth stress to match the pause in the musical phrase at these points. The interwoven refrain is a concession to the musical dimension of the ballad; it may be a set of nonsense syllables (“Dillum down dillum,” “Fa la la la”) or irrelevant rigmaroles of flowers or herbs. A few ballads have stanza-length burdens interspersed between the narrative stanzas, a technique borrowed from the medieval carols. The lyrical and incantatory effect of refrains during the ballad performance is very appealing, but in cold print they often look ridiculous, which is perhaps why early collectors failed to note them. In the first example above, it will be noted that the gaiety of the refrain is at odds with the mood of the meaningful lines. Not infrequently the ballad stanza satisfies the music’s insistence on lyrical flourishes by repeating textual phrases and lines:

So he ordered the grave to be opened wide,
And the shroud to be turned down;
And there he kissed her clay cold lips
Till the tears came trickling down, down, down,
Till the tears came trickling down

The refrain is just one of the many kinds of repetition employed in ballads. Incremental repetition, already discussed, is the structural principle on which whole ballads (“The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” “Lord Randal”) are organized, and many other ballads contain long exchanges of similarly patterned phrases building cumulatively toward the denouement:

“Oh what will you leave to your father dear?”
“The silver-shod steed that brought me here.”
“What will you leave to your mother dear?”
“My velvet pall and my silken gear.”
“What will you leave to your brother John?”
“The gallows-tree to hang him on.”

Any compressed narrative of sensational happenings told at a high pitch of feeling is bound to repeat words and phrases in order to accommodate the emotion that cannot be exhausted in one saying, a tendency that accounts for such stanzas as:

Then He says to His mother, “Oh: the withy [willow], oh:
the withy,
The bitter withy that causes me to smart, to
smart,
Oh: the withy, it shall be the very first tree
That perishes at the heart.”

Much repetition in ballads is mnemonic as well as dramatic. Since ballads are performed orally, the hearer cannot turn back a page to recover a vital detail that slipped by in a moment of inattention. Crucial facts in narrative, therefore, are incised in the memory by skillful repetition; instructions given in a speech are exactly repeated when the singer reports the complying action; answers follow the form of the questions that elicited them.

The exigencies of oral performance also account for the conventional stereotyped imagery of the ballads. For unlike the poet, who reaches for the individualistic, arresting figure of speech, the ballad singer seldom ventures beyond a limited stock of images and descriptive adjectives. Knights are always gallant, swords royal, water wan, and ladies gay. Whatever is red is as red as blood, roses, coral, rubies, or cherries; white is stereotyped as snow white, lily white, or milk white. Such conventions fall into place almost by reflex action, easing the strain on the singer’s memory and allowing him to give his full attention to the manipulation of the story. The resulting bareness of verbal texture, however, is more than compensated for by the dramatic rhetoric through which the narrative is projected. In any case, complex syntax and richness of language are forbidden to texts meant to be sung, for music engages too much of the hearer’s attention for him to untangle an ambitious construction or relish an original image. Originality indeed, like anything else that exalts the singer, violates ballad decorum, which insists that the singer remain impersonal.

Music

A ballad is not technically a ballad unless it is sung; but though tunes and texts are dynamically interdependent, it is not unusual to find the same version of a ballad being sung to a variety of tunes of suitable rhythm and metre or to find the same tune being used for several different ballads. And just as there are clusters of versions for most ballads, so a given ballad may have associated with it a family of tunes whose members appear to be versions of a single prototypical form.

Ballad tunes are based on the modes rather than on the diatonic and chromatic scales that are used in modern music. Where chromaticism is detected in American folk music, the inflected tones are derived from black folk practice or from learned music. Of the six modes, the preponderance of folk tunes are Ionian, Dorian, or Mixolydian; Lydian and Phrygian tunes are rare. The folk music least affected by sophisticated conditioning does not avail itself of the full seven tones that compose each of the modal scales. Instead, it exhibits gapped scales, omitting either one of the tones (hexatonic) or two of them (pentatonic). Modulation sometimes occurs in a ballad from one mode to an adjacent mode.

Most tunes consist of 16 bars with duple rhythm, or two beats per measure, prevailing slightly over triple rhythm. The tune, commensurate with the ballad stanza, is repeated as many times as there are stanzas. Unlike the “through-composed” art song, where the music is given nuances to correspond to the varying emotional colour of the content, the folk song affords little opportunity to inflect the contours of the melody. This limitation partly explains the impassive style of folk singing, Musical variation, however, is hardly less frequent than textual variation; indeed, it is almost impossible for a singer to perform a ballad exactly the same way twice. The stablest part of the tune occurs at the mid-cadence (the end of the second text line) and the final cadence (the end of the fourth line). The third phrase of the tune, corresponding to the third line of the stanza, proves statistically the most variable. Significantly, these notes happen to coincide with the rhyming words. The last note of the tune, the point of resolution and final repose, usually falls on the fundamental tone (i.e., keynote) of the scale; the mid-cadence falling normally a perfect fifth above the tonic or a perfect fourth below it. To make for singability, the intervals in the melodic progression seldom involve more than three degrees. And since the singer performs solo or plays the accompanying instrument himself, he need not keep rigidly to set duration or stress but may introduce grace notes to accommodate hypermetric syllables and lengthen notes for emphasis.