The term
blues ballad is used to refer to a specific form of popular music which fused Anglo-American and Afro-American styles from the late 19th century onward. Early versions combined elements of the European influenced "native American
ballad" with the forms of
African American music.
[ From the 20th century on it was also used to refer to a slow tempo, often sentimental song in a blues style.
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Structure and variations
The blues ballad often uses the Thirty-two-bar form of verse-verse-bridge-verse, in contrast to the 12-bar or 8-bar blues forms.[Boyd, Jack (1991). Encore!: A Guide to Enjoying Music, p. 31, . "32-bar is sometimes called ballad form because so many of our popular ballads, middle-of-the-road popular songs, and Country Western songs use this form."]
Popular blues ballads
The first blues ballads tended to deal with active protagonists, often anti-heroes, resisting adversity and authority, often in the context of industrialisation. They usually lacked the strong narrative common in European ballads, and emphasised instead individual character.[N. Cohen, Folk Music: a Regional Exploration (Greenwood, 2005), pp. 14-29, ] They were often accompanied by banjo and guitar and often followed a standard 12-bar the blues format, with a repeated refrain in the last line of every verse.[T. A. Green, Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (ABC-CLIO, 1997), p. 81, ] Blues ballads are usually anonymously authored and were performed by both black and white musicians in the early 20th century. Ballads about anti-heroes include "Wild Bill Jones", "Stagger Lee" and "John Hardy".[R. DeV Renwick, Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), pp. 25-6, ] The most famous blues ballads that deal with heroes in the context of industrialisation include those about John Henry and Casey Jones.[
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Blues ballads in other genres
From the late 19th century the term ballad began to be used for sentimental songs with their origins in the early ‘Tin Pan Alley’ music industry.[D. M. Randel, The Harvard Dictionary of Music (Harvard University Press, 4th edn., 2003), p. 73, ] As new genres of music, including the blues, began to emerge in the early 20th century the popularity of the genre faded, but the association with sentimentality meant led to this being used as the term for a slow love song from the 1950s onward.[
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Today the term is used to describe a song that uses a blues format with a slow tempo, often dealing with themes of love and affection.[ Examples include songs such as B. B. King's "Blues on the Bayou",][R. Kostelanetz and J. Reiswig, The B.B. King Reader: 6 Decades of Commentary (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2nd edn., 2005), p. 287, ] Fats Domino's "Every Night About This Time",[R. Coleman, "Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll (Da Capo Press, 2007), p. 63, ] The blues ballad format is also popular in rock, jazz, and country music, such as Janis Joplin's version of "Cry Baby"
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