Propaganda

Abstract

There remain to be considered, as a pendant to the ballads about the life of the common man, those ballads and songs which were addressed to him with some didactic purpose or palpable design, and made use of the description of his own life, in his own familiar poetic forms, to preach a message or propagate a cause amongst the people. The broadside tradition allowed of certain kinds of ballad with a message. Stories of personal tragedies, and pious retellings of Biblical or allegorical tales with a heavily pointed moral, had long been in use as aids to begging, seeking to move the listener to charity towards the singer which simple appreciation of the ballad sung would not evoke. By the end of the era of the street singer his income must have been at least as much derived from this kind of performance and response as from anyone’s real desire to hear and buy the ballads he affected to sell.’ For begging purposes the songs preferred were moralistic and pious, designed to impress the deserving respectability of the performer upon his benefactors, who were likely to be of all classes but, if they were able to give charity, were most likely ‘respectable’. More lively, but still by the nineteenth century declining in vigour and skill, were the ballads which represented the remnants of the political tradition of the broadside, which sought to convert the auditor to the writer’s persuasion on some current political concern.