MRS. GREEN British Literature Unit 2: Poetry & Satire Medieval Ballads MRS. GREEN British Literature Unit 2: Poetry & Satire

INSTRUMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES Intro video Medieval Music Medieval Instrumentals

WHAT IS A BALLAD? A ballad is a story poem set to music so that non-readers and non-writers could enjoy sensational events and everyday calamity. Usually from an anonymous author and, just like Anglo-Saxon works, were spread from singer to singer. The name of this type of singer was a Troubadour.

ELEMENTS OF BALLAD STRUCTURE Sung by a minstrel or troubadour with musical accompaniment Performed for an audience Tells a story of dramatic events Focuses on just one incident and begins in the midst of that incident May contain dialogue Four-line stanzas 2nd and 4th lines rhyme Refrains: repeated lines or phrases

COMMONALITIES IN BALLADS Supernatural events Sensational, sordid1, tragic subjects Refrain Omission of details Incremental repetition Question and answer format Conventional phrases *most of these elements were used to build suspense 1 marked by baseness or grossness; morally vile; dirty, filthy, wretched; self-serving

SUBJECTS IN BALLADS Tragic love Domestic conflicts Wars Shipwrecks Crimes Outlaws

THEMES IN BALLADS Revenge Rebellion Envy Betrayal Remorse Loyalty Patriotism Superstition

MODERN BALLADS

AMERICAN FOLK AND COUNTRY & WESTERN MUSIC When English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish people left their homes to settle in America, the old ballads were part of their baggage. Some ballads have changed little since then. When researchers traveled through the southern Appalachian Mountains in the early 1900s to record the songs of the mountain people, they found them singing “John Randolph,” a ballad markedly similar to “Lord Randall.” On the other hand, “Streets of Laredo,” which tells the story of a cowboy dying of a gunshot wound, retains the remnants of its British ancestry only in the line, “Oh beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly.” The fife and drum refer to a British military funeral. Even country and folk ballads written in this century tend to repeat the subjects and themes of the old medieval ballads. Consider: Ballads with supernatural elements, such as the country and western song “Phantom 309” about ghost truck drivers Ballads based on actual tragedies, such as the country and western song “Ballad of the Green Berets” from the Vietnam War era and the folk songs “Birmingham Sunday” from the civil rights struggle of the sixties and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” about a twentieth-century sea tragedy Ballads about domestic disasters, such as the country and western song “The Grand Tour,” about a singer who tours his home after his wife has left him

“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” The Charlie Daniels Band “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”

Adele “Someone Like You”

Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss “Whiskey Lullaby”

Garth Brooks “The Thunder Rolls”

“Somebody That I Used to Know” GOTYE (Feat. Kimbra) “Somebody That I Used to Know”