Folk Ballad And Ballad

Nothing, perhaps, serves better as an introduction to the Middle Ages than a glimpse at how it was preserved in verse. Medieval ballads are a specific branch of the folk song genre. As the name states, it origins in the medieval times, most likely during the high middle ages, around the late 13th, or the early 14th century. The songs and styles cover a number of topics and the most common themes such as: event/location, love, murder, hard trouble, hero/villain, work, and paranormal. Thousands of folk ballads have been recorded through the efforts of folk literature; which was a genre dedicated to preserving these and similar oral traditions. You probably won 't hear them on your favorite rock station, but folk ballads have been sung for thousands

Folk ballads took the musical element a step farther than epics or many other folk songs, though. The word ballad comes from the Latin word ballare, which means to dance, As people danced to the familiar rhythms, with their movements sometimes reflecting the story 's action, they would also be entertained with the generally brief and often tragic tales that folk ballads tend to tell. These stories frequently involve kings and knights, but they also quite often feature everyday people in everyday and commonly unfortunate situations. These people can be portrayed as either saints or outlaws, but either way their actions are regularly interpreted as

Stories of love are some of the most popular stories in existence. Mainly because they are easy to relate to whether they are a story of a new love or of love lost. Most everyone has experienced this and people like to listen to songs of similar experiences. A few examples of love ballads back in the middle ages were “Hind Horn” and “Thomas the Rhymer”.

This is another popular form of ballad because being on hard times or being poor is also a relatable thing for many people. Hard trouble ballads can have more or less of a narrative style. Imagine working in a field or making a pair of shoes or something along the lines of that. That’s exactly how many work ballads were made. People would sing songs of their work and dreams to keep their pace and their spirits high. Call and response is often used in these types of ballads meaning that a line would be sung by one person and then the line would be repeated or the next line would be sung by everyone else around.

Finally, the less common but always fun, paranormal ballads were about ghosts, demons, the devil, gods, and so on. One of these old ballads is called, “Wife at Usher’s Well,” tells the story of a mother who is visited by the ghosts of her three children who all died at sea. These ballads also usually have to have a more narrative style since the story has to be set up in order for the listener to feel sadness, fear, or excitement once the paranormal aspects of the song are