📚 Ballads

Sung narrative: the broadside, the border ballad, and the refrain that carried the tune for centuries.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject ballads in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads	John Avery Lomax	1910	68
	Ballades and verses vain	Andrew Lang	1884	66
	32 ballades in blue china	Andrew Lang	1833	47
	A Collection of Ballads	Andrew Lang	1897	47
	Salt water ballads and poems	John Masefield	1912	40
	The Bab ballads	Sir William Schwenck Gilbert	1869	37
	Flor nueva de romances viejos	Ramón Menéndez Pidal	1928	26
	The traditional tunes of the Child ballads	Bertrand Harris Bronson	1959	26
	Salt-water ballad	John Masefield	1902	23
	Essays on song-writing	John Aikin	1772	16
	Ancient Spanish ballads	John Gibson Lockhart	1823	15
	The Old Bush Songs	Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson	1905	13
	The romantic Scottish ballads: their epoch and authorship	Robert Chambers	1820	9
	Bishop Percy's folio manuscript	Thomas Percy	1867	9
	Ballads: romantic, fantastical, and humorous	William Harrison Ainsworth	1855	8
	Ballads and other poems	Alfred Lord Tennyson	1880	8
	The ballad in literature	T. F. Henderson	1912	8
	The ballad in music	Sydney Northcote	1942	8
	Ballads	Hal Leonard Corp.	1999	7
	Ballads old and new	Henry Bernard Cotterill	1905	6
	The book of ballads	Charles Vess	1997	6
	Historical & legendary ballads & songs	Thornbury, Walter	1876	5
	Judeo-Spanish ballads from New York	M. J. Benardete	1981	5
	Memory in oral traditions	David C. Rubin	1995	5
	Ballads and tales	William Makepeace Thackeray	1869	4
	Jazz Ballads	Jeff Arnold	2006	4
	Medieval song	James J. Wilhelm	1971	3
	Jazz Ballads	Hal Leonard Corp.	1994	3
	The Walled-Up Wife	Alan Dundes	1996	3
	Gypsy ballads	Federico García Lorca	1953	2

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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