F J Child never got round to providing a definition of what he considered to be a ballad, his promised Introduction to the ESPB being thwarted by his death. He did, however, say things like "a definition is easier to feel than to formulate", which means pretty much "I know one when I see one". To accept Child as canonical in terms of traditional Scots and English balladry is not to go along with all his choices. He often contradicted himself - pouring scorn on broadsides on the one hand, then incorporating them as his key texts on another. Or holding a belief that the ballads were "of the people" whilst regarding recently-collected examples from oral tradition as necessarily degenerate (to Child, 'authenticity' was defined largely by antiquity and correspondence with examples from European folklore). Also bear in mind that he died before the boom in song collecting during the early 20th century, and was thus to a great extent unaware of the continuing popularity of many of his titles. There are surprising omissions and inclusions: No "Long A-Growing" or "Polly Vaughan", but all kinds of stuff that, as Steve says, had only the flimsiest toehold - if any - in oral tradition. And how do we explain why "Marrowbones" is left out, but "Get Up and Bar the Door" and "The Friar in the Well" are in?

On the plus side, he was well aware of the kind of tinkering that the likes of Percy and Scott practised, and did at least dig beyond their published collections to find the original source material.

The defining features of the traditional ballad have been listed by many authors subsequent to Child (e.g. Robert Graves), and include many of the features mentioned by Uncle Dave and Jim Carroll (in his paste of Funk and Wagnall) at the top of the thread. However, it's not difficult to find examples that contradict F & W's No. 4) "A ballad focuses on a single incident" (expressed more colourfully by Graves as "the play begins in the fifth act"). We can all think of ballads in which more than one act of the play is presented, sometimes with years elapsing in between. A better description that I heard recently is that of "leaping and lingering": the ballad devotes several verses to a particular piece of action, then suddenly leaps ahead to linger on a consequent situation.

The repetitions that some of you seem to find redundant and irritating are also considered by many to be defining features of ballad style (although again they're not universal). More common than simple repetitions are the "incremental repetitions", in which a a standardized verse form is used to move along the action:

"They hadn't been a sailing, a mile, a mile
A mile but barely one...."

"They hadn't been a sailing a mile, a mile
A mile but barely two...."

To my mind these add greatly to the tension in the story, and to condense them for the sake of brevity would be to rob the ballad form of one of its most potent weapons. Would 'The Cruel Mother' have half the impact if the ghosts of the dead children did not repeat the early verses describing their murder? As for 'Lord Randall' - well, I sing it, so I'm not about to concede that it's a waste of space. It's true it has an unusually repetitive form, with five eighths of each verse being standardized, but for me it packs a big emotional clout. And where is the tension in announcing that the sweetheart is to be left "a rope for to hang her", without having first listed the bequests to the other family members (bear in mind too that inheritance was a big issue in the societies which nurtured these ballads)?

Interesting discussion, anyway.
Brian