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 Ballads
There are many reasons for revival of ballads. Scholarly research has opened up the field. The development of state and national archives is a mark of growing recognition of their cultural responsibilities by government agencies. During the depression years there was much salvaging of folk songs under the Federal Writers' Project. The growing interest in "the American way" which developed during the last war has led to the collecting of folk items of all sorts - not only songs and ballads, but fiddle tunes, dance calls, singing games, nursery rhymes, folk tales and sayings, recipes, quilt patterns, traditional remedies - anything that may be depended upon to travel where people go, changing with new conditions but maintaining an essential sameness.
But the periodic revival, or indeed the continuous practice of some of our older songs cannot be fully accounted for by the efforts of scholars and teachers and librarians. The principal reason for the return of the ballads is the vitality that lies in the song itself. Because it was good, it has lived. And the ballads are one of the most prevalent types of folk song in today's revival.
The folk ballads are the only form of medieval vernacular poetry which has continuously survived. The traditional ballads, however, which possess the germ of poetic life, have only recently been isolated; only in the twentieth century was the term restricted to orally transmitted narrative verse set to a tune. There have been attempts, unsuccessful in part, to derive the word ballad from ballare (Italian, to dance), but the connection between ballad and dance, while it has existed in many countries - for the ballad is known throughout Europe - is not everywhere established. Dance has probably contributed to the British ballads such rhythmic elements as the refrain, ballad and dance song having met at some medieval crossroads; but there is little evidence that ballads were danced in Britain. The fourteenth century ballade is an elaborately contrived art lyric, subjective and non-narrative.
As we understand it today, the traditional ballads are "songs that tell a story," in simple verse and to a simple tune. They are the product of no one time or person; its author, if ever known, has been lost in the obscurity of the past and in the processes of oral tradition. Its medium is word of mouth rather than print. It goes its way independent of literary influences, carrying for a while the accretions of this or that day and singer, but sloughing them off as it passes to the next. It has no one original text, being freshly created by each successive singer as he makes his own version.
Ballads depend for their life on themes of universal appeal-stories of family tragedy, of love and its many resulting situations presented with a certain intellectual and emotional simplicity sometimes missed by the sophisticated who do not respond at once to their elemental situations and artless style. Let it be said at once, however, that this simplicity is not to be confused with ignorance or crudeness. The rural illiterate (for most folk songs have been recovered from rusticity), although unlettered and hence dependent upon his inner resources for entertainment, has sometimes a compensating power of memory which has stored his mind more fully than that of a better-read man, to say nothing of an enviable store of good sense and good taste. Nor are ballads the countryman's peculiar possession. Recent collectors have learned that they cannot afford to neglect the urban field.
But ballads are of a simplicity that prevents its independent existence, sometimes, indeed, being only a stereotyping of the pattern of tonal production. Hence ballads became the province of the man of letters, living a one-lunged life until its well-nigh atrophied second lung was inflated in the recent folk music revival. Like poetry read to oneself, the music of the verse was lost without the tune and with it the rhythm and color that are a large part of its effect.
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