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Rather than the more aristocratic themes and music of the Italian opera, the ballad operas were set to the music of popular folk songs and dealt with lower-class characters. [30] Subject matter involved the lower, often criminal, orders, and typically showed a suspension (or inversion) of the high moral values of the Italian opera of the period.
When the word ballad appears in the title of a song, as for example in the Beatles' "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (1969) or Billy Joel's "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" (1974), the folk music sense is generally implied. The term ballad is also sometimes applied to strophic story-songs more generally, such as Don McLean's "American Pie" (1971).
In 1960 John Jacob Niles published The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles, in which he connects folk songs which he collected throughout the southern United States and Appalachia in the early 20th century to the Child Ballads. Many of the songs he published were revived in the Folk music revival, for example "The Riddle Song" ("I gave my love a ...
The murder ballad "Pretty Polly", indexed by another scholar of American folk music, George Malcolm Laws, is an American version of an earlier British song, "The Gosport Tragedy". [6] The oldest surviving folk song of local Anglo-American origin is the ballad "Springfield Mountain" dating back to 1761 in Connecticut. [7]
Lyrical similarities signify that the song shares "The Unfortunate Rake" with "St. James Infirmary Blues" as a common ancestor. A later song that draws on elements from the ballad is the Eric Bogle song "No Man's Land". A version of the song, renamed to "A Young Trooper Cut Down", was recorded on the 2016 Harp and a Monkey album War Stories.
Folk songs are more or less in the public domain by definition, though there are many folk song entertainers who publish and record copyrighted original material. This tradition led also to the singer-songwriter style of performing, where an artist has written confessional poetry or personal statements and sings them set to music, most often ...
The songs are listed in the index by accession number, rather than (for example) by subject matter or in order of importance. Some well-known songs have low Roud numbers (for example, many of the Child Ballads), but others have high ones. Some of the songs were also included in the collection Jacobite Reliques by Scottish poet and novelist ...
Folk songs have been recorded since ancient times in China. The term Yuefu was used for a broad range of songs such as ballads, laments, folk songs, love songs, and songs performed at court. [136] China is a vast country, with a multiplicity of linguistic and geographic regions.