Geeking on Ballad Singing

[kniteracy]

Warning: there is a poll in this entry. It's a short poll, and it's not for everybody. I only want people who sing ballads to answer it. Now, that doesn't mean that only people who perform ballads can answer the poll: I want everyone who's ever learned and sung a ballad, even just for themselves, to answer this question. I'll put most of the discussion behind a cut-tag, and then I'll put the poll down at the bottom. Please tell me more of your feelings about ballads in comments, too.


Ballad Singing -- Just My Approach

Jean Ritchie says everybody in her family would find their own way to sing a song, even when many elements remained the same. When I first read that, it made me think about a class I had in Edinburgh years ago, a class that centred around storytelling with the harp.

Now, every storyteller will tell you that the key to telling a good story is not to memorise it exactly, not to tell it the same way exactly. Because if you try to memorise it, it will come out as if by rote, and your story won't be as interesting as it could be. I read somewhere once that harper William Jackson says his way of mastering a tune arrangement is not to have an arrangement. Total immersion in the subject, the song, the story, the tune, knowing it in your bones, that's the way I tell stories, it's the way I play the harp-- and it's the way I sing.

Sure, songs, rhyming songs, short songs, they're made to be remembered exactly. But what about big, long ballads? Like a story, every ballad has important elements that need to appear in each iteration of the ballad. Just like the line in Goldilocks and the Three Bears where Papa Bear's porridge is too hot, Mama Bear's porridge is too cold, and Baby Bear's porridge is just right, there are lines in ballads as in stories that listeners are waiting for. Sometimes these show up as repeated lines that they can sing along with you ("Oh, the wind and the rain," for example, or perhaps "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme," for another), and sometimes they show up as plot elements, like the fact that the elf queen's horse's mane must have a number of silver bells hanging from it, or the idea that in their journey to Fair Elfland, True Thomas and the elfin lady have to go over a river of tears and a river of blood, and they have to pass through an orchard of cursed apples and come to an intersection with four roads: the one they came from, the road to righteousness (heaven), the road to folly (hell), and the road to Elfinland. These are all story elements, and it might be easier to remember them in a particular order, but is it important that it all be the same, all the time, every time?

When I sing Barbara Allen, for example, there are some plot points that I always keep in, some plot points that I never put in, and some that come and go. I always sing about the bells tolling, but I don't always put in the part about Barbara Allen's mother dying. I don't ever sing the bit where she asks to look at his dead body, however: I just don't like that part.

I really treat singing ballads the same way I treat telling stories. I repeat some of the same phrases, but not all of them, every time. I like ballads with repeating lines: they're good mnemonics, and if you're lucky you can get people to sing along with them. But I don't sing them the same way, and I don't set out to sing them the same way. I don't learn ballads by rote. I learn them the way I learn stories, by motif and plotline, and then I just kind of let them take care of themselves.

What's your approach? If you're a ballad singer, answer my poll, and leave your thoughts in comments!

[Poll #776874]

Comments

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

I did learn shedloads of ballads for my finals, where I wrote quite a good essay (for finals) about ballads, memory, changing of bits of ballads &c. (I have forgotten most of them). However, I learn by hearing, and my particular memory tends to remember things *exactly* as I've heard them, so I learn the particular singer's slight deviations and grace notes as well.
I don't sing in public very often, but I can at a pinch make up tiny bits that fit if I have forgotten the exact wording.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

It vaguely depends on sources to be honest. I've only got one source for Bill Norrie, for instance, and for all it's long, there's not a spare verse in there, so I sing 'em all every time. Ornamentation and phrasing all very through the song and from singing to singing.

It's similar with Tamlyn, but there's a couple of sets of verses that I sing or not as the mood (and the time) takes me.

Once a song's settled in, I'm less likely to tinker with the words and more likely to experiment with stylistic stuff.

[billroper]

To some extent, it depends on how you define a "ballad". Generally, I consider it to be a longish song that tells a story, but I suspect this doesn't necessarily fit the dictionary definition.

But by my definition, Stray Dog Man is a ballad. So is Apology. And I find that the music doesn't vary so much there as the interstitial patter.

For example, we were sitting at Dorsai Thing doing Apology and got to the patter about the music festival in southeastern Ohio. Wulf was sitting there nodding, as he's quite familiar with the festival. So when I got to the point of saying, "All right, now who could have predicted that?", Gretchen was able to respond, "Wulf knew!"

[bardling.livejournal.com]

I've never thought about learning ballads any differently from learning other songs, really. Or all that much about how I learn any song. I suspect I'm another one who isn't all that clear on the definition of "ballad". I do know that I don't do storytelling and wouldn't really know how to (best) go about learning that (successfully).
So - I don't know, really. A goodly portion of 1, with a bit of 2 mixed in? Reallyreally not sure.

How do you feel about-

[maugorn.livejournal.com]

How do feel about, (and is it worth appending your poll?)

Fitting different pieces of different versions of a ballad together to form (what you think) is a whole?

Sometimes I'll be looking at or listening to a ballad, and I will begin to have feelings like
"This verse is broken"
"This verse doesn't belong" or more often
"There's a piece missing -right here!"

And I'll go and start researching and whether it's luck of the draw (since "versions" can form a statistically large pool to draw from), or maybe I'm onto something, but the majority of the time I'll find my not broken verse, versions where the "odd" verse isn't there (and sometimes the song(s) where it *did* come from), and especially, my missing pieces.

So in the end, my *version* becomes an almost to sometimes very idiosyncratic version cut and pasted with my own best efforts at tweaking it back into a whole.
I'm reasonably sure that Childe, Burns, Niles, and Carter have done this as well.

What's your take?

Re: How do you feel about-

[telynor.livejournal.com]

The poll is really about how we learn and sing existing ballads. I was just curious. Just so you know, LJ Polls can't be amended or edited, so I try to make mine as simple as possible. ;)

However, for my thoughts on putting versions together and playing all around with them, see these two posts:

http://telynor.livejournal.com/551462.html ; and
http://telynor.livejournal.com/551739.html

(You might enjoy that. Also, anything tagged 'ballads')

[gbdances.livejournal.com]

Hmmm ... I don't know if I differentiate all that much between "ballads" and other songs, either; simply because I tend to see every song as a story/saga/narrative of some sort. I think it depends on the audience which portions (other than key plot developments) you fcous on, leave out, embellish, etc. The audience, and the message you're trying to get across. One telling of a tale might emphasize the bravery of the warriors, the other the anguish of those left behind, a third the oneness between the enemies, a four the impartiality of time to the whole struggle. In that way, I suppose, a well-sung ballad is like a Sufi story; depending on how you read it, or the number of times you hear it sung different ways, you'll take away more (or at least, different) perspectives than if you heard it the same way every time.

To me, there's another element as well. There needs to be some reason why the singer has selected this particular ballad, other than it's a crowd favorite (which to me reduces the performer to a jukebox); what's your connection to the song? What element of it (character, theme, plot, moral, etc.) is most meaningful to you? If that changes every time you hear it, and you reflect that variance in your performance, then the song will never become boring or trite -- to you, or your audience.

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

Well ok - I *said* that I sing them the same every time but that's almost surely not true. The real truth is I have relatively limited experience with singing traditional ballad. So vocally and stylistically I am quite sure they vary but lyrics? I either memorize them or use the lyrics. (can you say "haven't been gigging in a long time?" ;-)

I think ideally though your approach seems right to me.

I'll never forget once listening to Lorraine Lee Hammond singing "Daily Growing" and she got a verse out of order - I mean really mess up the plot - out of order. She proceeded to improv a really funny new verse about time travel in old British Ballads. Ed and I guffawed out loud.

Hugs

[resourceress.livejournal.com]

The learning and the singing of ballads are two different things for me. I learn them pretty much straight as my source sang/played them, but after a while they start to mutate as I get more comfortable with them. The Interminable Ballads(TM) are often best to tinker with, if for no other reason than to keep the audience on its toes a little and not bore yourself to tears by the 9th verse. And, as you say, there's often so much space to work within the bits between the really vital plot points that you can get creative without losing the sense of the whole thing. Plus, there's that good ol' Folk Process thang that's always happening to some degree. People hear what they want to hear, and edit as they will.

The ballads in my repertoire are "The Wind and the Rain", "Thomas the Rhymer", "Sweet William" and "Barbara Allen" as performed by my former band, Giant's Dance (and, in the case of the latter, by Abunai as well). "The Wind and the Rain" is probably my favorite of them. These came to me tinkered with to start, but they slowly got more changes as we kept playing and performing them.

[patoadam]

Perhaps you will find the following amusing.

How do you learn and sing ballads?

1. Find ballad (Lord Randal) in poetry anthology, when in high school.
2. Wait.
3. Go to college. Find Child in college library. Look up Lord Randal. Discover, to ones horror, that Child didn't write down the melodies.
4. Compose own melody.
5. Sing. Sing many times over a period of years.
6. Discover The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads.
7. Look up Lord Randal in TSToCPB.
8. Discover that one prefers one's own melody to any of the traditional ones.
9. Stop singing Lord Randal because it may not be cricket to sing a traditional ballad to a modern melody.

[nw1.livejournal.com]

I'd say it's better to sing it to your own melody than worry about whether it's "cricket", but then I've never worried about such things anyway.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I don't know many ballads, and I know virtually no songs off by heart, but for Shaggy Dog stories I remember the punchline, the basic setup, and any important repeated parts (as you say, the bits the listeners wait for). That doesn't have a tune, of course. The few I do know with tunes I treat more as songs, and keep pretty much to the original order (although I do vary some parts to fit the audience and occasion, especially if young people are present!) ecept for the bits I forget and slip in later. But as a listener I have no objection to hearing a different version of a ballad (I know of at least four quite different versions of True Thomas, for example).

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

I picked the first answer to your first question, because it's closest, but my real answer is more similar to pdcawley's.

Also, when I'm learning interminably long Elizabethan broadsides (I got a fabulous book of them not that long ago) I'll usually go through the ones I might actually want to sing in public and mark sets of verses that can be dropped to save time (e.g., the condensed version of "Shore's Wife" that I usually sing is maybe half the length of the full text and still gets the story across perfectly well, plus it's not very obviously ripped off from Heywood's Edward IV, not like most people would recognize that)...

Neat poll, btw!

[nw1.livejournal.com]

I treat them as my own. I rip them apart, rewrite verses, write my own music to them, whatever seems interesting as I'm learning and arranging them. In the case of The Death Of Mother Jones (not *exactly* a ballad, but a folk song nonetheless), my version is probably unrecognizable except for the shared title. But to me, that's part of the whole point of folk musics. This music belongs to us, to all of us. It's our birthright. Ours to do with as we will.
All the songs I know end up in loosely two categories. There's "kind of know, and would sing for fun in my living room", and "performance ready". Performance ready songs tend to be (nearly) lyrically fixed - if the creative part of my mind doesn't have to worry about them, it can worry more about all the other stuff, and my creative side worries too much as it is.
So, the story in ballad becomes an aide memoire. "First this, then this, then this" - and the lyrics themselves fall out of that. FWIW, I often use similar aides memoire for my original songs. As a song goes from performance ready back to kind of know and back, it often gets changed, rewritten, verses swapped, etc. because that kind of work, being more structured is best done on paper.

Funny you should mention Barbara Allen and True Thomas though - the versions I know don't mention most of the elements you listed.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I'll clarify my own responses in a comment. On the memorize vs. tell a story, it's not strictly a black and white thing, but I'm not able to improvise something that remotely scans and rhymes, so if I don't know what I'm going to sing in advance it doesn't work. That doesn't mean I learn the song and never change it; I think about it, I listen to other versions, and I often make conscious changes.

Favorite ballad? Really, the one I'm singing at the time. But I picked a favorite that came to mind.

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

Honestly, it depends a bit on the ballad. I'm more likely to drop entire verses in or out or switch verses around than I am to really change things within a verse. Though I will occasionally. It can depend on the length and where and why I'm singing. Because I will occasionally do things like combine two half-verses and drop the other halves and other things like that.

That said, I have no problem with the storytelling 'know the story, don't worry so much about the wording'... but I'm not really a good enough musician to do that easily with music along.