The first three of these characteristics are already present in Kittredge's definition. The fourth describes real-world practice, as reflected both in modern field studies and in analysis of earlier manuscripts. The issue of anonymous authorship and oral transmission has been a matter of considerable debate, and will be discussed last. All five characteristics are subject to exceptions. Let's look at these characteristics in greater detail. A ballad tells a story, or a piece of a story. That's central. I've heard it claimed that every song tells a story, but most songs actually do not do so, except peripherally. To adduce a popular example, "Greensleeves" (I gave her lots of clothes but she still wouldn't have me) doesn't tell a story, in any interesting sense of the word. Spring is here! Spring is here! Conversely, not every narrative song is a ballad: The "Agincourt Carol", for instance, (Our King took his army to Agincourt, fought the French, big cock and trounced them) can reasonably be said to tell a story, but it's too unlike a ballad in other respects. One can find the odd song that's considered a ballad even though it's lost almost all vestiges of story. 2), the connection to the story has been lost almost completely: All that's left is a pair of singers exchanging lists of impossible tasks. 2 because it is so closely related to older ballads (see discussion in Part II) from whose bones we can still see scraps of story hanging. The "Scarborough Fair" that most of us know is a modern ballad. Ballads tend to cut to the heart of a story: This is what happened. This is who was there. This is what they did. This is what they said. Both are question-and-answer exchanges between the protagonist and his mother. Not much attention is paid to what the characters are wearing, how lovely the trees are, or what a broken heart feels like. Ballads tend to be characterized by impersonality on the part of the singer: The narrator is not personally touched by story, is not taking sides, and typically sings without much dramatization. When a judgment is to be voiced, it comes from within the tale. 84): She rejects him. He dies of a broken heart. She dies of a broken heart. Indeed, the latter is sometimes referred to as the "ballad stanza" or "ballad measure". When the logic of the language calls for a three-line stanza, but the ballad form requires four, we often get a `weak' second line that fills out the count without actually saying anything. And so merrily trudged o'er the lee. To come to her speedily. Down by the greenwood side-e-o. In general, refrains are where the music is most likely to force deviations from the common verse structure, and where exceptions are most likely to occur. 44, which is twelve lines long! The simple verse form, strongly reinforced by the logic of the melody, has a tremendous influence on how the story is told. Speech and actions are typically structured in units of a half or full stanza, and this has a powerful tendency to keep the narrative lean. When things are happening in units of two or four short lines, there isn't much room for convoluted sentences, subordinate clauses, nested conditionals, or long descriptions. Rather, the form enforces simple sentences and descriptions, short story units, and short speech units. A single speech, in particular, will rarely carry over multiple stanzas. The simple and ubiquitous metrical structure also means that phrases, formulae, and even entire stanzas from one ballad can be borrowed by many other ballads. A `formula' is a stock wording that tends to migrate from ballad to ballad as a unit. Similarly, the standard scansion means that a given ballad can be sung to the tunes of a thousand other ballads. Singers tend to discover early that most songs can - with sufficient effort - be sung to the tunes of most other songs, but that the fit is much better if both songs have similar meters. Bertrand H. Bronson did for ballad music what Child did for the lyrics: His four-volume The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads collects 4120 tunes taken from manuscripts, field recordings, and earlier collections, as well as many lyrics that were not available to Child. Each group of songs is accompanied by a short essay tracing or analyzing its music. His analysis of ballad tunes shows that they are overwhelmingly modal: About 5% had asystematic gaps in their scales (usually a missing sixth); about 5% had accidentals (usually an inflected seventh). The other 90% were purely modal. Popular modern musical practice, by contrast, is heavily chromatic. There is a strong preference for the major modes - Ionian, Mixolydian, and related gapped scales - but considerable use is made of the minor modes - Aeolian, Dorian, and related scales. Modern musicians have a strong tendency to force early music into major/minor tonality. If you have learned an originally-Mixolydian ballad from another singer, or from a modern recording, there is a good chance that it has been changed to major/Ionian by sharping the seventh. If the ballad was originally Dorian, there is an excellent chance that it has been changed to minor/Aeolian by flatting the sixth. The distinction between traditional songs and composed ones, between folk ballads and literary ballads, was of great concern to scholars (and folk musicians) earlier in this century. Some scholars saw the two kinds of ballads as completely distinct -- the extreme viewpoint being that traditional ballads never had composers, but somehow evolved from the primordial musical ooze through some folk process. Even those who rejected this distinction, however, tended to view ballads which had not undergone some oral transmission with a degree of suspicion. The suspicion is not unjustified: Literary creations in the style of traditional ballads really do tend to have a different `feel' from those which have undergone the test of oral transmission. It is worth being aware, particularly if you wish to read older discussions of ballads, that the subject of anonymous authorship and transmission is one over which bitter academic wars have been fought, and barrels of heart's ink have been shed. Personally, I am leery of the stereotyped distinction between county-folk, singing the songs they learned from their grandparents, and city-folk, writing new works of artifice. Songwriters have always been delighted to filch good songs and inspirations from the countryside, or wherever else they could be found, and country-folk have always been as interested in learning the latest songs from London as in resinging their grandparents' hand-me-downs. For the purposes of SCA recreation, the dichotomy between an oral tradition and a written one is particularly unhelpful: The ballads we can trace to our period are the ones that someone wrote down, or we wouldn't be able to trace them. We can make guesses as to whether they existed in the oral tradition before they were written down, but we can rarely be sure. Nor can we know the extent to which those who recorded them embellished them in the process. The Child ballad is a late-period phenomenon, by SCA standards. Such ballads may or may not have been sung as far back as the fifteenth century. They were certainly being sung by the sixteenth century, but not many of them were being recorded. Our good records don't begin until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the ballads that are popular today are usually nineteenth- or twentieth-century variants.