What is a Ballad?
What is a Ballad?
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Greenest state in the Land of the Free
Raised in the woods so he knew every tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three.
Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the wild frontier!
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed
Then one day he was shooting at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubbling crude.
Both of those passages are the opening stanzas to modern-day ballads. The first tells the story of Davy Crockett. The second is the theme song for the show The Beverly Hillbillies.
A ballad is a type of narrative poetry. It tells a short story in verse. Most ballads were originally written to be sung.
Imagine sitting by a campfire and singing a song such as "On Top of Old Smoky" or "The Other Day I Met a Bear." The stories you sing by a campfire are often ballads.
While every ballad is a little different, most ballads contain the following elements:
- A complete story - with a beginning, middle, and end
- Four-line stanzas called quatrains
- Rhymed stanzas - usually abab or abcb
- A refrain - a line, section of lines, or phrase that is repeated through the poem
- Dialogue - conversations between characters or lines spoken by one character
- Third-person narration - a narrator usually tells the ballad using words like he/she/they
- Simple language - ballads were meant to be sung in an informal setting, usually with people who were not educated. They also were fairly easy to memorize.
- Full of imagery - poets paint a picture of what is going on throughout the story
- A tragic or triumphant theme - many ballads either tell a really sad story or a really incredible story
To learn more about ballads, read the ballads and answer the questions on the worksheets below.
Related Worksheets:
Related Lessons: