Ballad - Sentimental Ballads

Sentimental Ballads

Now the most commonly understood meaning of the term ballad, sentimental ballads, sometimes called "tear-jerkers" or "drawing-room ballads" owing to their popularity with the middle classes, had their origins in the early ‘Tin Pan Alley’ music industry of the later 19th century. They were generally sentimental, narrative, strophic songs published separately or as part of an opera (descendants perhaps of broadside ballads, but with printed music, and usually newly composed. Such songs include "Little Rosewood Casket" (1870), "After the Ball" (1892) and "Danny Boy". By the Victorian era, ballad had come to mean any sentimental popular song, especially so-called "royalty ballads", which publishers would pay popular singers to perform in Britain and the United States in "ballad concerts." Some of Stephen Foster's songs exemplify this genre. By the 1920s, composers of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway used ballad to signify a slow, sentimental tune or love song, often written in a fairly standardized form (see below). Jazz musicians sometimes broaden the term still further to embrace all slow-tempo pieces.