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

2. INSTRUMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Intro video Medieval Music Medieval Instrumentals

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. SUBJECTS IN BALLADS Tragic love Domestic conflicts Wars Shipwrecks
Crimes
Outlaws

7. THEMES IN BALLADS Revenge Rebellion Envy Betrayal Remorse Loyalty
Patriotism
Superstition

8. MODERN BALLADS

9. 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

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

11. Adele
“Someone Like You”

12. Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss
“Whiskey Lullaby”

13. Garth Brooks
“The Thunder Rolls”

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