A short definition of the popular ballad (known also as the folk ballad or traditional ballad) is that it is a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story.
Ballads are thus the narrative species of folk songs, which originate, and are communicated orally, among illiterate or only partly literate people. In all probability the initial version of a ballad was composed by a single author, but he or she is unknown; and since each singer who learns and repeats an oral ballad is apt to introduce changes in both the text and the tune, it exists in many variant forms. Typically, the popular ballad is dramatic, condensed, and impersonal: the narrator begins with the climactic episode, tells the story tersely by means of action and dialogue (sometimes by means of the dialogue alone), and tells it without self-reference or the expression of personal attitudes or feelings. The most common stanza form—called the ballad stanza—is a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. This is the form of "Sir Patrick Spens"; the first stanza of this ballad also exemplifies the conventionally abrupt opening and the manner of proceeding by third-person narration, curtly sketched setting and action, sharp transition, and spare dialogue: The king sits in Dumferling towne, Drinking the blude-red wine: • "O whar will I get a guid sailor, To sail this schip of mine?"
Many ballads employ set formulas (which helped the singer remember the course of the song) including
(1) stock descriptive phrases like "blood-red wine" and "milk-white steed,"
(2) a refrain in each stanza ("Edward," "Lord Randall"),
(3) incremental repetition, in which a line or stanza is repeated, but with an addition that advances the story ("Lord Randall," "Child Waters"). (See oral formulaic poetry.)
Although many traditional ballads probably originated in the later Middle Ages, they were not collected and printed until the eighteenth century,first in England, then in Germany. In 1765 Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry which, although most of the contents had been rewritten in the style of Percy's era, did much to inaugurate widespread interest in folk literature. The basic modern collection is Francis J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98), which includes 305 ballads, many of them in variant versions. Bertrand H. Bronson has edited The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (4 vols., 1959-72). Popular ballads are still being sung—and collected, now with the help of a tape recorder—in the British Isles and remote rural areas of America. To the songs that early settlers inherited from Great Britain, America has added native forms of the ballad, such as those sung by lumberjacks, cowboys, laborers, and social protesters. A number of recent folk singers, including Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, themselves compose ballads; most of these, however, such as "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde" (about a notorious gangster and his moll), are closer to the journalistic "broadside ballad" than to the archaic and heroic mode of the popular ballads in the Child collection.