Word: ballads
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plaintive ballad about the man who dared ask a wartime waiter for one meat ball is fast becoming a fad with U.S. bobby-soxers. The adolescents have no idea how old-fashioned they are: their latest musical hero was well known to Boston in the 1850s. Almost a century ago, a shy Harvard Latin professor named George Martin Lane tried to buy a single fish ball in a restaurant, heard his piddling order bellowed out by a surly waiter...
Half fey, half folksy, the play is based on the Southern mountaineer (not the Old English) ballad of Barbara Allen. For love of high-stepping young Barbara (Carol Stone), a witch boy in the Great Smokies (Richard Hart) has a Conjur Woman make him human. But he can remain so, the old crone tells him, only if Barbara stays faithful to him for a year after their marriage. On the last night of the year, the community,* at last awake to the boy's origin, compels Barbara to sin. (A rape scene that the censors knocked...
...Moon. With its folk songs and dances, its revival meetings and darting witch girls, it is freaked with color, touched with strangeness. But all this adds brightness rather than body to a yarn that is never very robust, and that takes hours to re-count what the ballad tells in a moment. Nor is there much more real poetry to Dark of the Moon than there is real drama. Its folkways make pleasant enough rustic vaudeville, but they smell of Broadway. Its witches' world escapes absurdity, but falls far short of enchantment...
...Decca records, which Crosby has helped to make, put out statistics which offered a partial answer. Crosby can sing almost any type of song, and sing it well. His best-sellers are a ballad (White Christmas, 1,700,000 records), a hymn (Silent Night, 1,500,000), a cowboy song (Don't Fence Me In, 1,250,000), a romantic love song (Sunday, Monday and Always, more than one million...
...Canada) was in the midst of a five-week Manhattan engagement. It was performing ballets in Diaghilev's best classical tradition. But the big novelty in Manhattan was a rowdy, corn-likkered, genuinely U.S. ballet: Frankie and Johnnie, an adaptation of a well-known U.S. folk ballad...