Songs, Ballads, and Broadsides

Ballads were a ubiquitous product of seventeenth-century British popular culture. Cheaply printed, broadside ballads were hawked by street singers, who were associated with criminality. Topics varied from natural disasters to politics, from religious moralising to bawdry, making them an excellent tool for understanding seventeenth-century British society. White-letter ballads were political and usually high-brow, while black-letter ballads, which used simple language, could be on any topic. Set to familiar tunes, the songs were easy to learn and sing. The melodies were consciously chosen by composers because of their emotional and social connotations which added extra meaning to the new lyrics. The melody also dictated their structure, providing multiple kinds of metre rather than a single ‘ballad metre’. Ballads could use a variety of narrative voices, from the first-person voice of the condemned criminal to dialogue between two singers or could use invented regional accents to mock non-English people as ‘Other’.