4.4 Songs of Broken Hearts

Singing Stories: Ballads

Exalted literature often concerns itself with the experiences of the aristocratic elite. It often tells stories. Epics are normally composed in verse and tell the stories of great heroes or leaders. Lyric poetry like “The Lady of Shallot” often channels stories that stretch beyond their narrow boundaries.

Another Genre of poetry that tells stories is that of the Ballad. Unlike the lyric, a ballad tells a more or less complete story. Traditionally, ballads were sung where common folk gather and the characters represented lower rungs on the social ladder. For centuries, ballads were composed, sung, and revised by bards singing in taverns and inns. No one wrote them down, and bards felt free to express their poetic talents in their own versions of popular standards. Thus, no version could be “authoritative.”

Thomas Rowlandson. (19th Century). The Ballad Singers. Drawing & Watercolor.

In the 16th Century, printers sold books to the learned but experimented with other genres for a commonplace audience. A broadside ballad fixed a particular version of a previously oral ballad on a large, single sheet of paper. Some of these continue to be sung today by folk singers. Many told stories of love’s heartbreak, often the grief of one lamenting the oldest heartbreak on earth: a lover’s mortality.

Some poets who appealed to learned tastes composed Literary Ballads that emulated to some degree the Style and themes of the folk traditions which were often despised by the erudite world. Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” reflects that perspective. However, in contrast with folk ballads that evolve in the singing of countless bards, a literary ballad generally reflects the particular style and voice of the writer. Literary ballads were generally not composed to be sung to music, though of course later adaptations could occur.

The Unquiet Grave

Ballads were sung and eventually published throughout Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. These folk songs crossed the Atlantic with emigrants to the British colonies and formed the spine of folk and bluegrass music among Scotch Irish and Celtic North Americans. Even today, you can walk into a Celtic pub and enjoy the wail of fiddles and the crooning of modern bards conferring their own takes on traditional ballads. You might hear a bard singing “The Unquiet Grave.”

“The Unquiet Grave” (15th Century?) 

Listen to Luke Kelly’s performance of the ballad

“The Unquiet Grave” illustrates themes common to traditional ballads. Such songs celebrate heroic ideals of true love, but the challenge in them is very often the perpetual human enemy, death. In such ballads, lovers are separated by death, but the living lover remains perennially faithful, often loitering about by a gravesite haunted by the spectral voice of the beloved.

Ballad of Frankie and Johnny

Are you a folkie? Or do you prefer American music with African American roots? In slavery-haunted America, Black musicians exorcised their people’s demons with songs that dealt with the violence of the world they inhabit. Many of the resulting songs were ballads telling stories of heartbreak.

In 1899, a woman named Frankie Baker shot and killed her unfaithful lover, Allen Britt, in St. Louis. Within a year, the ballad “Frankie Killed Allen” had been composed by Bill Dooley and published by Hughie Cannon.

More popularly titled “Frankie and Johnny,” the song has been sung by scores of artists and dramatized in several films. Thus, despite the original publication, there is no authoritative version. All, however, share variants of the haunting refrain that speaks for millions of women in many ages and cultures: “He was my man, and he done me wrong.”

Mississippi John Hurt in the Library of Congress Recording Laboratory. (March 17, 1964).

The 1929 version by Mississippi John Hurt shines as an example of Delta-style Blues. Here is the text of Hurt’s version of the ballad.

Mississippi John Hurt (1928) “Frankie and Johnny”

In 1955, Lena Horne recorded a highly produced and lushly orchestrated version of “Frankie and Johnny”: link. In this dramatized version, the vocalist takes up the Persona of Frankie,: “He was my man, but he done me wrong!”

 Singin’ Da Blues

The American songbook has been deeply influenced by African American musical and literary traditions. Early American folklore and songs blended Euro-American idioms with the rhythms of Africans forcibly imported as slaves. By the early 20th Century, African American music was beginning to establish an astonishing level of influence over all of American pop music. Not surprisingly, the music of a people enslaved and then denied full citizenship is full of heartbreak.

African American musicians, as slaves and as “freedmen,”[1] developed three traditions of startlingly innovative composition. “Negro spirituals” were sung in churches and on concert stages around the world. Jazz music was developed to entertain patrons of brothels and evolved into a transcendent form wedding individual expression with mutually supportive partnership. And the Blues were sung to ease the breaking heart:

The most pervasive traditions of American music today—rock and roll, rhythm and blues, reggae, hip hop, and many dimensions of contemporary country—descend at least in part from the blues.

Rick Darnell and Roy Hawkins (1969) “The Thrill is Gone”

Listen to the performance by the great B. B. King.

G. B. Le Querrec. (1969). B. B. King. Photograph.

Thematically, notice that the lamentation in this blues arises from the death of passion, the other side of passion’s coin. Initially, it seems so powerful in its promise of euphoria. But, it doesn’t seem to last. And as lovers learn generation after generation, it doesn’t offer much as a foundation for a lasting relationship. “The thrill is gone.”

Like Hebrew verse, a blues stanza uses repetition for emphasis, memory, and developing elucidation. Line 2 more or less repeats line 1. Line 3 takes things further. And line 4 resolves the tension. In this case, the stanza carries the repetition over 4 rather than 2 lines. Repeated blues lines linger like the throbbing pulses of heartbreak.

Torch Songs

It is difficult to empathize with the frustration felt by Ovid’s Phoebus lusting after Daphne or King David’s power play against a married woman. But the all-too-common outcome of passion, invoked over the centuries by many artists, is the heartbreak of unrequited love.

Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. (1933) “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

They asked me how I knew,
My true love was true,
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I, of course, replied,
“Something here inside,
Cannot be denied.”

They said, “Someday you’ll find,
All who love are blind.
Oh-oh-oh-oh, when your heart’s on fire,
You must realize,
Smoke gets in your eyes.”

So I chaffed them,
And I gaily laughed,
To think they could doubt my love.
Yet today, my love has flown away.
I am without my love.

Now, laughing friends deride,
Tears I cannot hide.
Oh-oh-oh-oh, so I smile and say,
“When a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes.”
Smoke gets in your eyes.

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Listen to the great Sarah Vaughn’s performance of the song.

W. P. Gottlieb, W. P. (August 1946) Portrait of Sarah Vaughan. Café Society. Photograph.

Torch songs maintain their appeal into more recent times. In 2011, Adele recorded a monster hit that poignantly captures the heartbreak and weary resolution of a left-behind lover encountering the lost beloved.

Adele. (2011). 21.  Album Cover.

Adele and Dan Wilson, D. (2011). “Someone like You.”

About now, however, you should be in a position to track the poetic structures of the songs. Our old friends, Parallelism, Anaphora, and sheer poetic repetition are here. But notice also the Rhyme Scheme and triple beat lyrics in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The patterns are looser in “Someone like You,” but don’t miss the occasional rhymes that provide thematic emphasis.

The Spent Passions of Crazy Jane

In his later years, William Butler Yeats’ composed spare, hard-hitting verse that packed the punch of both disillusionment and wisdom, doubt and enduring hope.  In 1932, Yeats published  Words for Music Perhaps, exploring the link between literary verse and song lyrics. In that collection, he composed a series of poems expressing the jaded life view of Crazy Jane, a woman who has walked the path of life from passionate youth to sterile old age. “Crazy Jane and the Bishop” is no torch song. But it profoundly probes the bitter ashes of broken love.

William Butler Yeats. (1932). “Crazy Jane and the Bishop”

Vital Questions

Context

Passion’s heartbreak is probably universal to every human context. In our sampling of heartbreak’s songbook, however, we can distinguish between two broadly understood contexts.

• “High” literature: traditions associated with cultural elites and steeped in academic knowledge
• Folk traditions: songs and ballads that directly the language and experience of non-aristocratic people who have limited access to academic knowledge

Of course, this opposition is largely nonsense. Shakespeare for example was a jobbing actor from a middling background who composed one of the world’s greatest bodies of writing drawing on a very limited degree of schooling. High literature that becomes lost in arcane snobbery soon descends into banal insignificance. And many an unschooled lyricist achieves breathtaking levels of poetic expression.

Still, tensions between the two poetic worlds are worthy of notice. Sometimes, authors on one side or the other express disdain for the opposition. And the forms of the writing do differ in fascinating ways.

Content

One way or another, all our songs of heartbreak tell stories. Lyrics suggest narrative backgrounds for their reflections. Dramas, epics, and ballads tell complete tales. And all mourn for the failure of love, either through the loved one’s indifference, betrayal, or mortality. Love stories share a narrative core.

But these narratives also raise thematic questions. Is love’s potential heartbreak worth risking? Is heartbreak a good reason to retreat into despairing isolation? How does one deal with a lover’s betrayal? How does one continue to live after one’s beloved passes away?

Form

By now, you should be getting clear on core terms: lyric, epic, ballad, drama. Hopefully, you are becoming skilled in hearing poetic rhythms. Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot,” for example, has a fascinating stanzaic form: can you hear the rhymes? Can you sense the rollicking rhythms of the meter? (We’ll nail that concept down as we go along.) Remember—approaching a poem: