Ballads

Ballads are narrative songs or poems that tell a story in a direct, dramatic way. They originated in medieval Europe, especially in Britain and Ireland, within folk communities and were transmitted orally before being written down. Traditional ballads often center on dramatic events such as lovers' quarrels, murders, betrayals, shipwrecks, or encounters with the supernatural, and they frequently feature vivid dialogue and a sense of immediacy.

Form and structure commonly associate with ballads: short stanzas of four lines, known as a ballad stanza, usually arranged in iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme such as ABCB. The language tends to be simple and concrete, and the narrative unfolds through scenes rather than sustained exposition. Refrains or incremental repetition of lines or phrases are common, helping to heighten memory and songability.

Traditionally, ballads were anonymous and passed from singer to singer in oral culture. Broadside ballads appeared on single sheets, disseminating sensational stories to a wide audience. In the 18th and 19th centuries, literary poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge revived and adapted the form, producing literary ballads that mimic or reinterpret the traditional style while pursuing broader themes or experimental techniques.

Notable traditional examples include Barbara Allen, Tam Lin, and Lord Randal, among others. Ballads have influenced folk music and storytelling for centuries and continue to be studied as a durable form of narrative lyric, capable of conveying communal history, superstition, and shared emotion.