Traditional Ballads: The Outlaw Murray And The Young Tamlane

Love, lust, murder, thievery, incest, death, and betrayal are just some of the intriguing, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing topics of a traditional ballad. A traditional what? A ballad is "…a song that tells a story, or- to take the other point of view – a story told in song. More formally…a short poem, adapted for singing, simple in plot and metrical s structure, divided into stanzas, and characterized by complete impersonality so far as the author or singer is concerned."(Kittredge, Zweig, 3) The songs tend to leave out details and go straight to the heart of the story, even though some ballads, like "The Outlaw Murray and "The Young Tamlane" go on for seventy-five and fifty-six stanzas, respectively. So what's the big deal about some songs that tell of broken hearts, star-crossed lovers and unmerciful murderers? These old, carefully preserved ballads can be said to be the
The ballad usually tells a story in the first person point of view, and is unlike a normal story in that it mixes up the sequence in which the occurring events are told, which can be quite confusing to the reader or listener. Also, certain phrases and situations tend to repeat in the ballad multiple times. Secondly, details are not very important at all. The common questions of who, what, when, and where can be answered satisfiably without all the insignificant details of what someone looked like or what they wore. Sometimes the ballad is told entirely in dialogue form, which can be seen in an excerpt from a ballad such as Child Ballad #13,