Broadside Ballad
Quick answer: Broadside ballads explained: the printed street ballads of crime, scandal and disaster sold from the 1500s onward, their form, history, and how to write one.
Long before tabloids, there was a cheaper and more musical way to get the news: a single printed sheet, a woodcut at the top, and the day's murder or shipwreck rendered in rhyming stanzas you could sing on the way home. These were broadside ballads, hawked on street corners across England and much of Europe from the sixteenth century into the nineteenth, priced at a penny or less and printed in the hundreds of thousands.
They were journalism, entertainment, and pop music at once. Each sheet named a familiar melody, with the instruction printed as 'to the tune of' some well-known air, so buyers could sing the new words immediately. Shakespeare put a ballad-seller on stage in The Winter's Tale, and Samuel Pepys collected the sheets by the hundreds; his collection and the Bodleian Library's digital archive preserve thousands today.
What made a broadside a broadside
The broadside is defined by its medium and its market rather than a unique metre. Verse-wise, most use the standard ballad quatrain, four-stress and three-stress lines alternating with ABCB rhyme, or the longer fourteener couplet that splits into the same shape. The topical subject did the selling: executions, monstrous births, floods, battles, political scandals, and love gone spectacularly wrong.
Conventions hardened fast. Titles promised the whole story, often in twenty words or more. Crime ballads were frequently voiced by the condemned themselves, a first-person 'goodnight' delivered from the scaffold, repentance included. And everything had to fit one sheet, which taught the writers brutal economy.
Hacks, hits, and the birth of the news song
Broadside writers were professionals paid by the sheet, and quality swung wildly; plenty of surviving examples are gloriously bad. But the trade built the pipeline between events and song that later gave us the murder ballad, the protest song, and topical songwriting generally. When Bob Dylan set current events in ballad stanzas, he was working the broadside's exact trade.
The sheets also fed the oral tradition they borrowed from. Printed ballads crossed into folk memory, mutated, and were collected centuries later as 'traditional', which delights and torments scholars in equal measure.
Writing a modern broadside
Pick a real, recent, specific event, the more local the better, and gather facts as a reporter would: names, times, places, numbers. Choose a tune you already know and write to it in ballad quatrains; the borrowed melody enforces singability better than any counting.
Write a headline title that gives the whole story away, then tell it fast: scene, event, aftermath, and a final stanza that turns to the audience with a warning or a moral, the broadside's traditional sign-off. Unlike literary ballads, the broadside is allowed its moral, and works best when the moral is slightly too confident.
Strengths and pitfalls
The form is built for topicality, satire, and communal outrage or grief. It handles dark material with a survivor's swagger, and its cheerful metre against grim subject matter produces a tone nothing else quite achieves.
The pitfall is cruelty. Real events involve real people, and the line between ballad and bullying is thinner than it was in 1620. The other trap is vagueness: a broadside about 'society' is no broadside at all. Name the ship, the street, the storm.
What poets can take from this
- Base the poem on one specific, dated, nameable event.
- Write to an existing tune to keep every stanza singable.
- Give it a long, shameless, story-spoiling title.
- Use the condemned or the survivor as first-person narrator when it fits.
- End with a direct address to the listeners, moral included.
- Compress: the whole tale must fit one imaginary printed sheet.
Try it yourself
Write a broadside ballad about a genuinely strange local event from the past year, titled in the old style ('A True and Wonderful Account of...'), set to a tune you can actually hum.
Questions
What is a broadside ballad?
A topical ballad printed on one side of a cheap single sheet and sold on the street, flourishing from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Sheets named a familiar tune so buyers could sing the new words at once.
How is a broadside ballad different from a traditional ballad?
Form and metre are usually the same ballad quatrain. The difference is origin and purpose: broadsides were commercial, topical, and authored for print, while traditional ballads evolved anonymously in oral circulation.
Where can I read original broadside ballads?
The Bodleian Library's broadside ballads archive and the English Broadside Ballad Archive host thousands of digitised sheets, and the Pepys collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge, preserves one of the great personal hoards.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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