While ballad performance is a descendent of minstrelsy, the oral tradition converts to a written one via the text of the ballad, not its musical notation. In fact, ballad music was often not identified on the printed broadside; only the name of the tune was noted. For example, there are around 1800 ballads in the Pepys collection and only 167 of them have accompanying music printed before the verses, and of these only 10 occur outside of Volume 5 (the volumes progress basically chronologically). Even the presence of musical annotation is no guarantee that the music printed will make sense or fit the ballad text (Luckett xxv). It is safe to assume then, that when a ballad, such as “Ann Wallen’s Lamentation, for the murthering of her husband John Wallen,” is noted as being sung to the tune of Fortune my Foe and no annotation is given, that many of the general populace would know this tune already.

Class and Ballad Music

In Popular Music of the Olden Times, W. Chappell emphasizes that music was not only the province of the upper classes. In fact, the ability to make music was expected of many lower class tradesmen:

In [Thomas] Deloney’s History of the gentle Craft, one who tries to pass for a shoemaker was detected as an imposter because he could neither "sing, sound the trumpet, play upon the flute, nor reckon up his tools in rhyme" (98).

Deloney, a playwright and author of many ballads himself, emphasizes what other authors of the time have to say about singing and labor: “Never trust a tailor that does not sing at his work, for his mind is of nothing but filching” (Merrythought qtd. in Chappell 99). Trustworthiness among the lower classes is tied to their ability to sing, whether to occupy themselves while at work, to entertain those who come into their shops (barber shops were furnished with lutes, citterns, and virginals [Chappell 98]) or as Bruce Smith notes, to actually further and enhance the job they are doing. Smith writes about female singers at work: “The rhythm of their singing, in steady four-beat lines, is synchronized with the rhythms of their hands as they comb out the tangles of wool and set the strands to the turning wheels” (174). And, just as upper class women were expected to be musically competent on at least one instrument, “even the city of London advertised the musical abilities of boys educated in Bridewell and Christ’s Hospital as a mode of recommending them as servants, apprentices, or husbandmen” (98). Broadsides themselves were so common that “every poore Milk maid can chant and chirp it under her Cow; which she useth an harmless charme to make her let downe her milke” (Brathwait qtd. In Smith 177).

Singing Ballads: Instrumental Accompaniment or A Capella?

Smith emphasizes the vocal nature of the ballads and the relation between orality and literacy, but Chappell makes it clear that “the lute, cittern, and virginal for the amusement of waiting customers, were necessary furniture of the barber’s shop” (98). Thus ballads could be sung a capella or with accompaniment. The ballad monger would often hawk his wares without an instrument, namely because many of these sellers were too poor to afford one. There were those who (in a negative assessment of the day) lived “a vagrant and vicious life, in every corner of cities and market towns of the realm singing and selling of ballads and pamphlets” (Kind Heart’s Dream qtd. in Rollins 306-7). In fact, Rollins goes on to point out that singers were often described as suffering from some sort of defect: “they were hideous, blind, one-legged, and even noseless” when in fact “most singers were normal physically and alert mentally” (307). The fact, though, that these sellers were characterized as imperfect reflects the general attitude about ballads in general, from accusations that the authors were lewd drunks, the sellers followed “a vagrant and vicious life,” or that the content deserved the treatment Sir William Cornwallis accorded to it: he asserted that he used ballads only as privy reading and that the “cleanlier profit” of having bought the ballad is achieved by its use as toilet paper (Smith 169).

Yet, while Cornwallis belittles ballads (even though he read them), others literally reveled in them. Stephen Gosson (related to Henry Gosson, a printer of many seventeenth century ballads) wrote in his Short Apologie of the School of Abuse in 1580:

London is so full of unprofitable pipers and fiddlers, that a man can no sooner enter a tavern, than two or three cast (i.e. companies) of them, hang at his heels, to give him a dance before he departs” (qtd. in Chappell 108).

Thus, in the alehouses and the barbershops, ballads would be sung with a background of musical instruments accompanying the singer. These instruments were most commonly the cittern, the gittern, the lute, and the virginal. The cittern is shaped like a guitar, but “only had four double strings of wire” and “the instructions for tuning are generally to draw up the treble string as high as possible without breaking it.” Strangely the third string was tuned lower than the fourth, and Chappell thinks the cittern was an English invention (101). Chappell writes that the gittern was similar to the cittern but smaller in size and strung with string (102). The lute, a very popular instrument of the time, is similar to the guitar as well, but has a superior tone, due to its pear-shaped back. Finally the virginal resembled “the ‘square’ pianoforte” but its tone came from wooden jacks that “twitched” the strings rather than “striking” them as a pianoforte’s hammers would (108). All of these circumstances, from the variety of people whose livelihoods were associated with the singing of ballads and ditties to the ubiquity of instruments available in both the upper and lower echelons, testify to the popularity of music in general and ballads in particular in Early Modern England:

They had music at dinner; music at supper; music at weddings; music at funerals; music at night; music at dawn; music at work; and music at play (Chappell 98).

~ Tassie Gniady

Works Cited

Chappell F.S.A., W. Popular Music of the Olden Time: A Collection of Ancient Songs, Ballads, and Dance Tunes, Illustrative of the National Music of England. London: Cramer, Beale, & Chappell, 1859.

Rollins, Hyder E. “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad.” PMLA, Volume 34, No. 2 (1919), 258-339.

Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999