AOL: How Flatt and Scruggs' 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett' Became a No. 1 Hit Against All Odds
While "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" became a big hit, Scruggs’ wife and manager, Louise, almost put a stop to the project. Speaking with NPR in 2003, she recalled showrunner Paul Henning approaching ...
How Flatt and Scruggs' 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett' Became a No. 1 Hit Against All Odds
Yahoo: How Flatt and Scruggs' 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett' Became a No. 1 Hit Against All Odds
Most northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four-line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter.
The era of the lyrical ballad is considered to have been the apex of the ballad's literary prestige. While lyrical ballads are still written today, the ballad as a literary form began to lose its prestige during the Victorian era because of its increasing association with sentimentality.
A broadside ballad relied not on sheet music but on common knowledge of a tune (it was indicated only by name).
Ballad, short narrative folk song, whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have little affected the habit of folk singing.
Beginning in the Renaissance, poets have adapted the conventions of the folk ballad for their own original compositions. Examples of this “literary” ballad form include John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”