<P> European Ballads have been generally classified into three major groups: traditional, broadside and literary . In America a distinction is drawn between ballads that are versions of European, particularly British and Irish songs, and' Native American ballads', developed without reference to earlier songs . A further development was the evolution of the blues ballad, which mixed the genre with Afro - American music . For the late 19th century the music publishing industry found a market for what are often termed sentimental ballads, and these are the origin of the modern use of the term' ballad' to mean a slow love song . </P> <P> The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as beginning with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe . From the end of the 15th century there are printed ballads that suggest a rich tradition of popular music . A reference in William Langland's Piers Plowman indicates that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from at least the late 14th century and the oldest detailed material is Wynkyn de Worde's collection of Robin Hood ballads printed about 1495 . </P> <P> Early collections of English ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (1633--1703) and in the Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley, 1st (1784), which paralleled the work in Scotland by Walter Scott and Robert Burns . Inspired by his reading as a teenager of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy, Scott began collecting ballads while he attended Edinburgh University in the 1790s . He published his research from 1802 to 1803 in a three - volume work, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border . Burns collaborated with James Johnson on the multi-volume Scots Musical Museum, a miscellany of folk songs and poetry with original work by Burns . Around the same time, he worked with George Thompson on A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice . </P> <P> Both Northern English and Southern Scots shared in the identified tradition of Border ballads, particularly evinced by the cross-border narrative in versions of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" sometimes associated with the Lancashire - born sixteenth - century minstrel Richard Sheale . </P>

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