V.

Types of Songs

There are many types of folk songs, including ballads, epics, folk theater tunes, songs that address important occasions, work songs, love songs, children’s songs, and religious songs. Each of these types has a specific purpose.

Ballads are songs that use a set of stanzas to tell stories involving one main incident. 'Barbara Allen' and 'Lord Randall,' both sung in countless variants, are two of the best-known ballads in the English-speaking world. American scholar Francis James Child collected, classified, and numbered (because variants have no standard titles) these and more than 300 other English and Scottish ballads. These songs are known as Child ballads, after their collector: 'Barbara Allen' is Child 78, 'Lord Randall' is Child 12, and so on. Child ballads constitute an especially large proportion of the body of folk songs in the Appalachian Mountain region of the East Coast of the United States. Sung mostly to old tunes that are frequently pentatonic, they show little influence from art or popular music. Modern ballads from these regions, often circulated in printed form on large sheets called broadsides and then passed on orally, frequently use tunes in major or minor keys. They are often sung with instrumental accompaniment and are closer to popular song and modern Protestant hymn styles. Their texts concern unhappy love, murders, events of war, and tragedies such as railroad wrecks. In contrast to the Child ballads, broadside ballads are specific and consistent in giving names, places, and dates. At one time they served as a way of spreading news. Although English ballads are best known in North America, the ballad as a type is found in all Western cultures.

Another type of narrative folk song is the epic, a drawn-out account focusing on the adventures of a hero. Found mainly in the Balkans, Russia, Finland, and the Middle East, epics are usually organized in lines or couplets rather than in stanzas. Best known are the Serbian epics telling about conflict between Christians and Muslims from the 1200s to the 1600s. Many of these epics take several hours to be told, and singers partially improvise with the use of melodic formulas (preset musical patterns). In Iran, epics concern Persian kings before the Islamic conquest of Iran and the deeds of the early leaders of Islam.

Folk theater can be found throughout Asia and in parts of Europe. Similar to medieval mystery plays, this form of theater is exemplified by narrations of the Christmas story. In folk theater, the style of the music is typically simple, involving repetitive melodies with short formulas and few tones.

A large group of folk songs may be called calendric—that is, they accompany rituals that mark major events in life or in the year's cycles. Included are songs sung at weddings, funerals, births, and the onset of puberty. In the West some calendric songs mark annual events that date from pre-Christian times, such as those celebrating summer and winter solstice, planting, and harvest. Others celebrate Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter. Many calendric songs are extremely old, using short forms and restricted scales, and they are often associated with instruments such as rattles, one-tone wooden trumpets, and flutes without finger holes.

Another category of folk music involves songs for crises such as war and illness. Although songs of this kind were probably common at one time, they are rare now.

Many work songs exist in Western cultures, especially in the folk music of African cultures in the Americas. People sing some work songs as rhythmic accompaniment to repetitive labor. Songs with texts that concern agricultural activities and other kinds of work can build the solidarity of the working group. Within this category are sea chanteys, cowboy songs, and railroad songs, many of them ballads.

Additional types of folk songs include love songs, marching songs (once sung by soldiers on long marches), and songs of general entertainment. In the Balkans, for example, young people entertain themselves with songs while taking walks on holidays. Children's songs include lullabies, game songs, counting-out rhymes, and nursery rhyme songs. Another type is religious folk songs, which are generally hymns sung in rural churches.

Some folk songs have no words, only a tune. The main purpose of this instrumental folk music is to accompany dance and marching. Occasionally dancing is accompanied by singing. In Scandinavia, narrative ballads were once used for dancing.