28 January 2026

The cultural power of balladry

This ancient form can still entrance and unnerve us

Illustration by Matthew Richardson

“When is a ballad not a ballad?” The question was posed by the scholar Bertrand Harris Bronson in 1972, and the answer is, “When it has no tune.” Ballad Lines, a new musical by Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo that has debuted at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, is the tuneful story of a queer woman in 21st-century New York whose rediscovery of the Scottish, Irish and Appalachian folk traditions of her childhood takes her through a portal to 17th-century Scotland and 18th-century Ireland. The show celebrates the power of ballads – by which I do not mean the Power Ballads of stadium rock with their heavy drumming and guitar solos – but those equally stirring, authorless tales performed by unlettered wandering minstrels in the Middle Ages.

Not everyone would agree with Bronson: a ballad without a tune is still a ballad. While all ballads have beats, not all ballads are songs. Are ballads also poems? Bob Dylan is a balladeer as well as a Nobel Prize-winning poet, and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) initiated the English Romantic movement. But is Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” (1889) (“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”) more than a tribute to music-hall tradition? When TS Eliot had time to kill, he would repeat to himself the lines of “Danny Deever”, the best of Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).

For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,
The Regiment’s in ’ollow square – they’re hangin’ him to-day;
They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut his stripes away,
An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.

The lines, critics might say, are too memorable to be good, and the scansion too slick to be poetry. Like the best balladeers, Kipling hypnotises his audience: this is what Coleridge meant in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) by the mariner’s “strange power of speech”, and what Eliot meant when he described the modern ballad, in his introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, as “a type of verse for the appreciation of which we are not provided with the proper critical tools”.

So what kind of thing is a ballad? Those that constitute as one might no longer all have tunes, but their characteristics have otherwise not changed for centuries. Ballads are pared-down dramatic tales that begin abruptly, in medias res. They describe a confrontation, with the action often taking place in dialogue, which is usually in the local vernacular. The language is simple, with plenty of nouns and fewer adjectives than verbs. Ballad metre uses four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines rhyme, but this can vary, and subjects include battles, love, murder, jealousy and revenge. The lives of the poor are turned upside down by fairies, witches and shapeshifters; pretty maids are transformed into monsters, young men into “laily worms”. There is no Heaven in the ballad universe: the dead either rot in the soil or go to Hell. In “The Unquiet Grave”, a man weeps for his dead lover with such integrity that her rest is disturbed and she has to ask him to stop:

The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?”

“’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.”

He should not kiss her, the corpse warns, because her breath smells “earthly strong”; also, as death will one day decay his heart too, he should enjoy life while he can.

Ballad characters tend to act cruelly, propelled by unexplained impulses. We have no idea, for example, why the king in “Sir Patrick Spens” (a traditional ballad admired by Coleridge) sends Sir Patrick on what will clearly be a fatal voyage to Norway in the middle of the winter, or why Coleridge’s mariner shoots the albatross. The sense of inhabiting an entirely irrational universe is part of the ballad’s appeal.

Within their terms and conditions, ballads are whatever we want them to be: they are as shapeshifting as the people they describe. They are also alive and well. Last year saw the release of two balladic films: Ballad of a Small Player and The Ballad of Wallis Island, as well as the publication of a gorgeous book, Amy Jeff’s Old Songs: Stories of Love and Death from Traditional Ballads, in which ten poems are retold in prose and illustrated by Gwen Burns. The book’s focus is on the supernatural ballads such as “Tam Lin”, where a knight abducted by the faeries awaits his damnation: “Pleasant is the fairy land, but an eerie tale to tell. For at the end of seven years, we are sent in tithe to hell.” The knight is rescued by Janet, who breaks the curse by “holding him fast” as he is transformed by the furious Faery Queen into first a bear, then a lion, a serpent, a hound, an eagle and a dragon. In “The Demon Lover”, another of Jeffs’ selected ballads, a sailor returning after seven years to claim his bride finds that she has married someone else. Tempted away from her family by promises of wealth, the faithless woman boards a ship with her former lover:

They had no saild a league, a league,
A league but barely three,
Until she espied his cloven foot,
And she wept right bitterly.

Elizabeth Bowen reworked the ballad in her story “The Daemon Lover” (1945), in which Mrs Drover rides in a taxi whose driver, she discovers, is her fiancé who died during the Great War: “Her mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.”

The ballad form adapts well to renewal because it was not fixed to begin with. From the 16th century, “The Ballad of Chevy Chase” is about a battle in the Cheviot Hills when Henry Percy, from the great Northumberland family, led a hunting party against the wishes of Earl Douglas, from the great Scottish family. “I never heard the olde song of Percy and Douglas,” wrote Philip Sidney in The Defence of Poesy (1595), “that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.” Like all ballads, it springs into action in the opening lines:

The Persè owt off Northombarlonde,
and avowe to God mayd he
That he wold hunte in the mowntayns
off Chyviat within days thre,
In the magger of doughtè Dogles,
and all that euer with him be.

The rhyme (he, thre, be), rhythm (alternating between nine and seven stresses per line) and repetition made it easier to remember, but because ballads were then a living art, with every recitation a personal performance, there was no “correct” version for the collectors to record. “The Huntis of Cheviot”, as it was titled, was first published in 1549 in a book of shepherd’s songs called The Complaynt of Scotland; Thomas Percy then took two different renditions, “The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chase” and “The Battle of Otterbourne” for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), and a variant called “The Hunting of the Cheviot” was included by the Harvard folklorist Francis James Child in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1884-98).

“It would be a mistake,” wrote TS Eliot, “to suppose that the audience for balladry consists of factory workers, mill hands, miners and agricultural labourers.” The audience for “Chevy Chase” included the Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson, who said he would rather have written this particular ballad than any of his plays and masques; Joseph Addison devoted two essays in the Spectator in 1711 to a “critique” of the ballad’s “majestik Simplicity” and “beautiful strokes”; versions of “Chevy Chase” were circulated in broadsides and reprinted in songbooks, and parodies, satires and sequels were sold. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy Linton laughs at Hareton Earnshaw for struggling with the ballad’s harder words, but today we are more likely to associate Chevy Chase with a Californian country club, or the gated suburb in Washington DC, or the comedian of the same name. These all go to show how ballads remain, in the most surprising ways, part of our bloodstream.

“Chevy Chase” is known as a border ballad, because it describes an event taking place in the stretch of wilderness dividing North Tyne from Scotland when the land was patrolled by men “with the outlook of Afghan tribesmen”, as the folksinger AL Lloyd puts, who “prized a poem almost as much as plunder”. But the otherworldly ballads are also border ballads, in so far as they describe crossing from Christendom to Elfland.

In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge divided these two worlds between them, with Wordsworth taking nature as his subject and Coleridge writing about supernature. The volume opens with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which begins with the mariner, a “grey-beard loon”, stopping a wedding guest who is on his way to the feast and holding him with his “glittering eye”. “‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.” But Coleridge’s ballad is not about a ship; it is about the mesmerising power of ballads. The mariner shoots the albatross that is hung around his neck as a reminder of his crime, and the ship falls under a curse. As the sole survivor of this hellish voyage, the mariner is doomed to the life of the wandering minstrel, passing “like night from land to land”, endlessly repeating the same tale. The wedding guest listens “like a three years’ child”, then crosses back through the portal to the natural world “like one who has been stunned”.

“Ballad Lines” runs at the Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London, until 21 March

[Further reading: Why are we so obsessed with Japan?]