BALLADS

Ballads—narrative folksongs first noted in Britain and throughout Western Europe in the late Middle Ages—were a cornerstone of nineteenth-century Anglo-American tradition, and slaves could not have helped hearing them. Ex-slaves knew some imported British ballads, a few indigenous Anglo-American ballads, and even more broadside ballads, a later variety that circulated both orally and on song sheets called broadsides, and that proliferated during the Civil War and afterward. In the late 1800s Blacks and whites together would create a uniquely American ballad subtype, the blues ballad, many examples of which are world famous today. However, these first Black ballad makers were the children and grandchildren of ex-slaves. For the ex-slaves themselves, ballads were minor musical diversions occasionally overheard from whites, yet comparatively insignificant in their own repertoires. Nevertheless, their memories do provide an intriguing prelude to the Black ballad-making that surged at the turn of the twentieth-century.