Sensational shipwrecks, plagues, train wrecks, mine explosions—all kinds of shocking acts of God and man—were regularly chronicled in ballads, a few of which remained in tradition, probably because of some special charm in the language or the music. The shipwreck that lies in the background of one of the most poetic of all ballads “Sir Patrick Spens” cannot be fixed, but “The Titanic,” “Casey Jones,” “The Wreck on the C & O,” and “The Johnstown Flood” are all circumstantially based on actual events.
Outlaws and badmen
Epic and saga heroes figure prominently in Continental balladries, notable examples being the Russian Vladimir, the Spanish Cid Campeador, the Greek Digenis Akritas, and the Danish Tord of Havsgaard and Diderik. This kind of hero never appears in English and Scottish ballads. But the outlaw hero of the type of the Serbian Marko Kraljević or the Danish Marsk Stig is exactly matched by the English Robin Hood, who is the hero of some 40 ballads, most of them of minstrel or broadside provenance. His chivalrous style and generosity to the poor was imitated by later ballad highwaymen in “Dick Turpin,” “Brennan on the Moor,” and “Jesse James.” “Henry Martyn” and “Captain Kidd” were popular pirate ballads, but the most widely sung was “The Flying Cloud,” a contrite “goodnight” warning young men to avoid the curse of piracy. The fact that so many folk heroes are sadistic bullies (“Stagolee”), robbers (“Dupree”), or pathological killers (“Sam Bass,” “Billy the Kid”) comments on the folk’s hostile attitude toward the church, constabulary, banks, and railroads. The kindly, law-abiding, devout, enduring steel driver “John Henry” is a rarity among ballad heroes.
Occupational ballads
A large section of balladry, especially American, deals with the hazards of such occupations as seafaring (“The Greenland Whale Fishery”), lumbering (“The Jam on Gerry’s Rock”), mining (“The Avondale Mine Disaster”), herding cattle (“Little Joe the Wrangler”), and the hardships of frontier life (“The Arkansaw Traveler”). But men in these occupations sang ballads also that had nothing to do with their proper work: “The Streets of Laredo,” for example, is known in lumberjack and soldier versions as well as the usual cowboy lament version, and the pirate ballad “The Flying Cloud” was much more popular in lumbermen’s shanties than in forecastles.
Chronology
Singing stories in song, either stories composed for the occasion out of a repertory of traditional motifs or phrases or stories preserved by memory and handed down orally, is found in most primitive cultures. The ballad habit thus is unquestionably very ancient. But the ballad genre itself could not have existed in anything like its present form before about 1100. “Judas,” the oldest example found in Francis James Child’s exhaustive collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), dates from 1300, but until the 17th century ballad records are sparse indeed. As an oral art, the ballad does not need to be written down to be performed or preserved; in any case, many of the carriers of the ballad tradition are illiterate and could not make use of a written and notated ballad. The few early ballads’ records survived accidentally, due to some monk’s, minstrel’s, or antiquary’s fascination with rustic pastimes.
The precise date of a ballad, therefore, or even any particular version of a ballad, is almost impossible to determine. In fact, to ask for the date of a folk ballad is to show that one misunderstands the peculiar nature of balladry. As remarked earlier, the first recording of a ballad must not be assumed to be the ballad’s original form; behind each recorded ballad can be one detected the working of tradition upon some earlier form, since a ballad does not become a ballad until it has run a course in tradition. Historical ballads would seem on the surface to be easily datable, but their origins are usually quite uncertain. The ballad could have arisen long after the events it describes, basing itself, as do the Russian ballads of the Kievan cycle and the Spanish ballads about the Cid, on chronicles or popular legends. It is also likely that many historical ballads developed from the revamping of earlier ballads on similar themes through the alteration of names, places, and local details.