![]() Walker was the uncle of ballad singers Warde, Pat, and Bogue Ford. They are an example of a family that handed down American, British, and Irish ballads, singing them in a traditional unembellished style.Īn occupational ballad sung by James H. Gibbs, who learned it as a boy on Nantucket, and who also spent time working as a whaler in his youth. ![]() This is an example of a British ballad brought to the United States by settlers and documented by James Francis Child.Ī ballad of the Nome, Alaska, gold rush of 1899-1909, sung by Paul Roseland in 1975. Some older ballads derive from songs composed by traveling minstrels who made their living through song in the houses of noblemen. Minstrels composed narrative songs describing love stories, historical battles and events, legends, and journeys to far off lands. As these songs were intended as entertainment, they had meters and melodies appropriate for dancing and were often sung with musical accompaniment. Early ballads, which in English date to before 1600, may also be derived from other medieval sources, including metrical romances, folk tales, and apocryphal gospels about the life of Jesus. ![]() Some early ballads from this tradition traveled to North America with the first European settlers. Margaret MacArthur, a folklorist and singer, performed some examples of the earliest known ballads brought to North America in her concert at the Library of Congress in 2005. "King John and the Bishop of Canterbury," tells a story about King John of England, who ruled from 1199 until 1216. Similarly, " The Death of Queen Jane," sung for the Library's Archive of Folk Song by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1949, recounts the story of the birth of King Edward VI of England, and the death in childbirth of his mother, Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII. Such historical ballads are often assumed to have been composed not long after the events they describe, although usually this is difficult to prove. #Ballad of jane lyrics fullįrog," a folktale ballad about a frog who marries a mouse, which was sung for the Library of Congress by Pearl Nye, derives from a ballad that was first mentioned in 1548, and for which a full text survives from 1611. The earliest ballads were often composed for the entertainment of the wealthy, but as printing became available, they were spread through printed lyrics, inexpensively published on one side of a piece of paper. Such a sheet was called a broadside or song sheet. Song sheets contained both lyric songs and ballads and were often sold by street vendors at cheap prices. Typically, such sheets contained only the words to the song, with no musical notation. Sometimes, the name of the intended melody was given, and the buyer was assumed to know the tune already. Vendors were frequently also singers who could demonstrate the proper melody to a buyer.
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