What classifies a ballad?
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative story and set to music. Ballads were characteristic of particularly British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the nineteenth century and used extensively across Europe and later north America, Australia and north Africa. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the eighteenth century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later twentieth century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song. In jazz and popular music, the term ballad denotes a short song in a slow tempo, usually with a romantic or sentimental text, though the term is also used for instrumental pieces.[1] Ballad is also used in modern pop and folk music for a (usually faster) strophic narrative song, analogous to the older poetic term ballad.[2] The latter usage is usually meant when the word ballad appears in the song’s title. The common modern us
