Similarities And Differences Between Ballads

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade November 2001

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"There You'll Be" by Faith Hill is a wonderful ballad as well as one of my favorite songs. This is one of the many every-day songs that we listen to, but we never really look into it and compare and contrast it will ballads from the past. For example, "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" by S. Foster is a ballad that was written in 1853 and people still know it to this day.

"Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" is different from "There You'll Be" because it rhymes. Where-as Faith Hill's song doesn't. Another major difference is that the modern ballad, "There You'll Be" is much longer than the older ballad. There are many words and phrases in S. Foster's ballad that we don't usually use in our common literature. For example, "many were the blithe birds that warbled them o'er," to translate this to the people that don't speak with these different words; it says, "many were the cheerful birds that chirped them over."

As you can see so far, there are many differences in the way that these two songs, otherwise known as ballads, were written. That could be because of the big time gap in between, there was just a changed in the popular type of music. Or it could simply be that the authors had different tastes in their music.

S. Foster repeated one line in the whole ballad, "Floating like a vapor on the soft summer air," that is what his "˜chorus' is made up of. Faith Hill's song has what most of us know as an actual chorus; she repeats a section (four sentences) of the song. It seems Anderson 2 to me that, the biggest difference in the two...