A ballad is a often a narrative set to music. Ballads
derive from the medieval French chanson balladee or ballade,
which were originally "dancing songs".Ballads were originally
composed to accompany dances, and so were composed in couplets with refrains in
alternate lines. These refrains would have been sung by the dancers in time
with the dance.In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a
self-contained story, often concise and rely on imagery, rather than
description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic.Themes
concerning rural laborers and their sexuality are common.Most northern and west
European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four-line stanzas)
of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter
(eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter.
Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the
scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads
consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables.Listen song here:YouTube
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