Blues ballad
Fusion of Afro-Anglo-American music
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.
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.
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. 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. 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". The most famous blues ballads that deal with heroes in the context of industrialisation include those about John Henry and Casey Jones.
The public source identifies “Blues ballad” as fusion of Afro-Anglo-American music. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blues, ballad and Fusion.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blues ballad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.