Stanley Edgar Hyman stated in 1951 that "...the (Child) ballad...is of ancient anonymous collective origin. It derives from a ritual, of which it is the dramatic text...presumably sung by a narrator, while the actor-dancers pantomime the action. When the ritual dies out, the dramatic song continues .. it never derives from a historical incident, although part of the "identification" process of later singers is to tack on historical names and references."

He also says, "If the ballads originate out of rite, at a stage in antiquity we can reconstruct from survivals in the texts--a matrilineal, totemic, hunting society of great primitiveness--then no ballads can arise later, when these conditions can no longer obtain, although old ones may be vastly transformed to fit new conditions...the ballad is ritual in origin, dramatic in structure, and magical in function."

Believing this, I discourage the mixing of broadsides and songs of modern creation in with the traditional ballads we sing at many San Francisco Bay Area workshops and gatherings. I attempt to demystify the Scottish dialects basic to many of the Child ballads, in workshops and performances, by describing the action and clarifying some of the vocabulary, which modern singers are not encouraged to puzzle out on their own as a form of English.

I believe that any looser definition of a ballad, embracing any sad or narrative or dramatic song, possibly with "critical bits of information left out," or simply structured in its lyric rhyme scheme, whether old or new, does a disservice to the scholarly understanding of the ballads as true antiques, functional gifts from pre-history, almost untouched glimpses into ancient collective thought.

Their origins as dramatic ritual descriptions--of sacrificial killings and escapes, seasonal combats, Year-King rites, parts of the Persephone and the Green Knight myths, marriage combats, rites of magical transformation, initiation/rebirth rites--and their wonderful preservation as some of the greatest poetry in English, separate them and put them above all modern, even mythic songwriting.