Word: ballades
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Murder Most Foul. "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up . . ." begins Margaret Rutherford, auditioning for a provincial repertory company with a daffy, definitive recitation of Robert Service's Yukon ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew. She has no sooner finished than an actor drops dead at her feet. Though the plot has it that the poor chap was done in by poison, it appears more likely that he died of envy, for an act like Rutherford's is hard to follow...
JOHN JACOB NILES: FOLK BALLADEER (RCA Victor). Niles started learning the folk music of his native Kentucky as a boy, collected more than 1,000 songs by the time of his extensive concert tours in the '30s and '40s, when these ballads (including Mary Hamilton, The Ballad of Barberry Ellen) were recorded. Niles weaves a strange, anachronistic spell as he sings them in a high, sweet voice, strumming a homemade dulcimer...
Lewis noted that a lack of tenderness has always characterized the poetry of the city. He quoted numerous English and Irish ballads, speaking with Midland and Irish accents when appropriate, to show that the street song is more often comic or dramatic than tender. "The golden age of innocence and love was in the country," he said. He added that if using the street ballad as social criticism requires "marking the literary muse into the literary prostitute, I'm in favor...
Lewis also described the street ballad's abundant subject matter. "The ballads, like modern newspapers, were filled with sex encounters, battles, and murders," he said. "The poor man then, as today, relished the predicaments of his superiors, whether of the gallows...
When, at the end, the narrator takes over completely, the film very nearly dissolves into fantasy. After scenes of Ireland's pleasant countryside, there are pictures of Kennedy's family; the austere background music of the first hour is replaced by a twinkling Irish ballad. There is the inevitable comparison with Lincoln (he alone "sits unmoved" as the procession passes by) and there are shots of the eternal flame ("the torch has been passed"). As the curtain closes, the narrator says that "Kennedy is invisible, but so is peace, and so are love and dreams...