Hi Barbara,
I've been watching this thread with interest, to see what came up before diving in myself. I'm really a singer of ballads, rather than an academic expert, and I know all too well the elephant traps and angry mobs awaiting those who try to offer definitions of anything.

I'd be interested to see the Funk and Wagnall definitions, Jim, although like you I'd have doubts about pasting six pages into a Mudcat thread. I don't have a copy of ESPB to hand, but to be going on with, here's a precis of M. J. C. Hodgart (others may know better than me how reliable his scholarship is, but thehis suggestions are recognizable to me at least):

"... anonymous, narrative poems, nearly always in short stanzas of two to four lines.... distinguished from other narrative poetry by a peculiar way of telling their stories.... they deal with one single situation and deal with it dramatically, beginning 'in the fifth act'.... a high proportion of dialogue to stage direction.... they are impersonal, with no moralising or didacticism.... they have their own peculiar rhetoric and phraseology."

He goes on to quote G. H. Gerould:

"A ballad is a folksong that tells a story with stress on the crucial situation, tells it by letting the action unfold itself in event and speech, and tells it objectively with little comment or intrusion of personal bias."

Although the idea of the ballad telling the story only from 'the fifth act' is a feature I recognize, I could argue over Hodgart's assertion that "the action is usually compressed into a few hours". It's not too hard to think of ballads in which days pass, pregnancies run their course, and babies grow to maturity. However it is broadly true that the crucial action is usually compressed into a short timespan.

From the practical point of view of someone hosting a ballad forum, it's interesting to see what participants actually arrive with. Many restrict themselves to the Child canon, of course, but you're also likely to hear later narrative songs which didn't make it into the ESPB - 'The Flying Cloud' was offered at the last ballad forum I gave, and although the action there is hardly compressed into a few hours, it would be hard to argue against its worthiness. Other people will take the view that any old traditional song must be a ballad, so you might get to hear the occasional lyric song (which Chicken Charlie above is quite right to distinguish from a ballad). Other punters will define the ballad as "a story song" in the broadest sense: 'Pretty Boy Floyd' arrived unexpectedly at one ballad session I hosted, and very welcome he was too.

Of modern efforts, the Chris Wood / Hugh Lupton 'Chip Shop' song is a very clever updating of ballad archetype, Jan Harmon's 'Song for a Seafarer' (which Janet Russell does) captures the old two-line refrain pattern rather well, and who could deny Richard Thompson's 'Vincent Black Lightning' its place in the modern ballad canon?