Child Ballads
438 videos • 26,856 views • by raymondcrooke The first ballad I heard from the collection of Francis James Child was "Barbara Allen", from my parents' Burl Ives collection, followed closely by his rendition of "Henry Martin". As a teenager, I listened to Joan Baez, and learned from her the significance of the bracketed Child number. As I gradually learned more of these songs, I formed the idea of recording all of them, but it is only a few years ago that I actually fulfilled this ambition. I now have a playlist of at least one version of each of the Child ballads on YouTube. A ballad is basically a song that tells a story, with the emphasis on action and dialogue and little time spent on characterization beyond choosing from a set of stock phrases. Child published the five-volume collection of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, at the end of the nineteenth century. He included every traditional English or Scottish ballad he could find, and identified 305 groups of songs, some with more than a hundred different versions. The standard metric form of a ballad is four lines of four stresses each, or four lines with 4 - 3 - 4 - 3 stresses. Lines are often repeated, apparently with the sole purpose of filling out the four line stanza. Another common device is to use a chorus in the second and fourth line to change a couplet into a four-line stanza. It is probably this four-line structure that ensures the action is cut down to the bare essentials as there is little room for any description or character development.