I have project in school on Ballads and I need to know a few examples... So what's your favorite ballad?
A long long time ago.... I can still remember how that music used to make me smile..... American Pie - Don McClean Sound of Silence - Simon and Garfunkle Patience - Guns and Roses Angie - Rolling Stones More Than Words - Extreme Ballads are typically slow, largo, love type songs usually involving acoustic instruments, and typified by one man and his acoustic guitar. These people, like John Denver, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, are often called Balladeers. Yesterday by the Beatles would be a ballad.
I don't think I have ever heard of Bob Dylan being called a balladeer. He's usually classified as a singer-songwriter. Back to topic, when I think about ballads, I often think of power ballads... Bon Jovi Poison Journey REO Speedwagon Other various 80's hair bands
I have. He is commonly called a balladeer. Here is an example taken from People of the Century: In the 1960s, he achieved a huge following with the albums "Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" (1963), with its hit "Blowin' In The Wind," and "Times They Are A-Changin'" (1964), which established him as the premier folk balladeer of his generation as well as its voice for social protest. link to source I don't know why some people like to be so quick to correct on this board.
It wasn't a criticism, and I am sorry that you seem to have taken it as so, my friend. Bob Dylan just isn't your classic love song-writing balladeer. Let me re-phrase. If I were to write a research paper on ballads, I wouldn't even mention Bob Dylan, because I think that there are so many more acts that are better examples of balladeers. Dylan is much more than that. Never owned it, never listened to it, never sat through the VH1 special, never even really listened to any of those bands(I own one Bon Jovi CD, that doesn't even get much play)...Those bands just happen to all be bands that are commonly associated with power ballads. What a coincidence that an album called "Power Ballads" would include songs by these bands.
Dylan is one of the World's most famous Balladeers. I understand you meant no critisism. It is only that Dylan is practically the definition of a balladeer, so I really don't understand the contention. And all balladeers are singer songwriters. There is not a distinction. Songs by Bob Dylan: Ballad For A Friend Ballad in Plain D Ballad of a Thin Man Ballad Of Donald White Ballad of Hollis Brown From Dylan @ 60 But in May 2001, Bob Dylan turns 60. In 1963, he was the baby-faced balladeer who warned previous generations that their "old road is rapidly aging." From Dylan Posters Bob was the first and the greatest balladeer and protest song writer of the sixties and seventies. From Yahoo News "In this song, Dylan has in a sense returned to his roots as a folk-country balladeer--the same roots that nourished the mountain men of western Virginia
I've heard Aerosmith's "Dream On" described as the first Power Ballad...don't know if it's really true or not.
A ballad is technically a song with a narrative (a story-telling song), and not necessarily a slow song, although ballad has come to mean that. So Bob Dylan is a balladeer in the strictest sense of the word.
Personally I love the Chili Peppers "Ballads" especially Under the Bridge.... that song pwns....w0ot.
And that is why I have never considered Bob Dylan a balladeer. I have always understood a ballad as its second(And now, very common) definition. I classify the Julio Iglesias's and that sort as balladeers. What you consider a balladeer, I have always caled a singer-songwriter. My mistake.
Here is an excellent piece on Ballads and their origin by the Poet Laureate of the United States. A friend of mine on a music bbs sent it to me when I mentioned this discussion to him. I hope it helps in your project: From the New York Times April 11, 2003 The Ballad of the Ballad, Poetry's Bearer of Bad News By BILLY COLLINS A true intellectual, it used to be said, is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. Or, more to the present purpose, it is someone who can hear the word ballad without thinking of Tony Bennett. Instead of a well-known singer, "Sir Patrick Spens" and "Barbara Allen" will spring to the lips of the truly literate at the mention of ballad, and for the very high of brow, Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" (1765) or Walter Scott's "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (1803, as if you didn't know) may come to mind. This weekend, a singular opportunity to join this more enlightened group presents itself in the form of the People's Poetry Gathering, a biennial three-day series of readings and talks sponsored by Poets House, the 40,000-volume poetry library on Spring Street in SoHo, and City Lore, a nonprofit group that documents urban folk life. The focus will be on narrative poetry, particularly the ballad and its big brother, the epic. The events are many and varied, ranging from Donald Hall speaking on Thomas Hardy to a talk on the cross-dressing ballad (women dressing as men to have adventures), from a tribute to Alan Lomax to public readings of "Gilgamesh" and "Beowulf" in their entirety and an all-day reading of "The Odyssey" by the translator Robert Fagles and others aboard the Peking, a tall ship at the South Street Seaport. There will also be rapping and slamming (take your helmet), as well as cowboy lyrics, calypso and klezmer music (separately) and the story-poems of countries including Russia, Finland, Albania and Kazakhstan. But before you set out to be entertained and educated, here is a little crash course on the ballad. The ballad, you may recall if you weren't absent that day, is basically bad news set to music and meter. Whether the ballad is about a sailor (drowns), lovers (shot, poisoned, beheaded) or an adventurer (gets lost, dies), the protagonist is always moving headlong toward some catastrophe. The ballad's emphasis is on fast-paced action. There is no time for the niceties of description, sentiment, explanation or motivation — leave all that to Henry James and Virginia Woolf — when the hero-victim is being swept, stanza by stanza, toward some inexorable destiny. Reversals of action are rare, as the course is set for good (or ill) early on. Balladeers are fond of tipping off the listener with premonitions like, "Daddy, please don't go down in the mine today." Like the world of Greek tragedy, that of the ballad is controlled by fate, the force that reminds us that events are not in the protagonist's hands but in the balladeer's as he cooks up some new form of doom for his unfortunate character. Like the blues — another delivery system for bad news — the ballad has a very simple structure, moving forward in rhymed quatrains (surely you weren't absent when Abba was covered) and set to "common meter" — that is, the four-beat/three-beat pattern you hear in hymns, nursery rhymes and most of Emily Dickinson's poems. Notice the similarity in these examples: Old King Cole was a merry old soul, And a merry old soul was he. Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me. The king sits in Dumferling town Drinking his blood-red wine. Ballads are also blueslike in their love of repetition. Repeat lines and refrains distribute the pain of the story more evenly over the ballad, as well as allowing the improvising singer to buy time to come up with the next lines. Parallelism and "ballad clichés" like "milk white hands" and "bonny blue eyes" also convey a feeling of familiarity so that listeners can focus on the unfolding story without being distracted by attention-getting stylistic originality. Formulaic images have the same effect; typical was the rose and brier motif, in which a rose grows from the grave of one doomed lover, a brier from the grave of the other, twining together to form a lasting love knot. And in the ballad, everything comes in threes: three ravens, three princesses, three sailors, three golden birds. As the critic David Buchan put it, "When a folklorist comes upon a three, he thinks, as does the Swiss who catches sight of his Alps again, `Now I am home!' " For me, the most intriguing aspect of the ballad is the vagueness of its origins. The late Middle Ages are recognized as the high-water mark for the art of the ballad, and broadside ballads, written on single sheets of paper and sold by peddlers, were popular as early as the 16th century, but because ballads were not systematically collected and written down until the late 18th century, we don't know exactly how, where or when the ballad began. Obviously a ballad cannot be studied until it is written down, but by then it has lost its oral originality, its text-free fluidity. The sonnet can be clearly traced to medieval Italy; the ode goes back to ancient Greece. But he who seeks the origin of the ballad will find himself squinting into the mists of the oral cultures that predate literacy, a time before print existed, before authorship was a concept. That song preceded writing is a historical no-brainer, no better expressed than by the ballad scholar Albert Lord: "People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs." Ballad singing before writing had much in common with jazz improvisation. Purists like Walter Scott bemoaned the corruption of ballads that inevitably took place as they were "handed from one ignorant reciter to another," but others see retelling as an opportunity for creative invention. The singer would know the basic plot (the chords to the story), begin with a refrain in mind and possess a repertory of ballad clichés (like musical phrases) to throw in as he composed on the spot. If you knew that Lord Randall, say, had been poisoned by his beloved and was now being questioned by his mother about the contents of his will, you would be off to a good start. Not unlike some rap music, sung ballads would combine spontaneity with a knowledge of, and a knack for, rhyming and setting information to a distinct meter. The anonymity of these balladeers might account for the impersonal tone of their compositions. Ballads tend to center on the protagonist — usually named — and commonly lack an "I." The narrator is a transparency through which we view the story, not a human presence; the author has no individual voice. As a result, disastrous events are delivered deadpan. Trivial and calamitous pieces of news are conveyed in the same flat, unemotional tone, sometimes with unintentionally comic results: Lord Thomas he had his sword by his side As he walked about the hall. He cut off his bride's head from her shoulders And he threw it against the wall. Now there's a bride's head you wouldn't want to revisit. The ballad returns us not only to the age before print, but also to an age before ambiguity, complex motivation and psychological nuance became the stuff of narrative literature. Because the original balladeers were unschooled, oral people, their songs may be seen as an early species of outsider poetry predating book culture and the idea of literature as art. That is more or less what Scott thought when he praised their "bold, rude, original cast of genius." Like all writers who feel an obligation to avoid worn-out language, Scott was fascinated with what it would have been like to compose verses before clichés existed. Surely some bard, he speculates, must have been the first to compare his hero to a lion. It was this innocent simplicity coupled with straightforward diction that attracted later print-corrupted poets like Goethe, Coleridge and Wordsworth to the ballad form. Eager to rescue poetry from false refinement, Wordsworth titled his earliest poems "Lyrical Ballads." The People's Poetry Gathering this weekend, part of National Poetry Month, is a celebration of the narrative in poetry that promises to delight as it instructs. In unsettled times like these, when world cultures, countries and religions are facing off in violent confrontations, we could benefit from the reminder that storytelling is common to all civilizations. Whether in the form of a sprawling epic or a pointed ballad, the story is our most ancient method of making sense out of experience and of preserving the past. Poetry, after all, began as a series of mnemonic devices, a check against forgetfulness. While political and religious leaders alike find new ways to inflame the divisions that separate humans, ethnographers, folklorists and modern balladeers are among the others who continue the quieter work of revealing threads sewn into the common coat of all peoples. From the anonymous folk who did not wait for print to begin singing to Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," telling stories may be the first and last thing that joins us together — stories of romance, adventure, quests, pirates, twins, homicide, shipwrecks, outlaws and, yes, war. (Billy Collins, a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College, (CUNY) is poet laureate of the United States.)
While we are talking about Bob Dylan here (sorta of), what Dylan album has "All Along the Watch Tower on It"?
"Okay, I'll take questions that can be answered with Google for a thousand...." John Wesley Harding (1968)
