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From WWR

Two ballad tags?

With two distinctly different definitions for the word "ballad" in regards to music, would having two different tags be useful to WWR?

wiktionary gives give the following definitions:

1. A long song or poem that tells a story.

   The poet composed a ballad praising the heroic exploits of the fallen commander.

2. A slow romantic pop song.

   On Friday nights, the roller rink had a time-block called "Lovers' Lap" when they played nothing but ballads on the overhead speakers.

wikipedia has even more meanings Ballad (music) and Ballad.

Seems we have both kinds of ballads on WWR.

Use just one tag for both

Use two different tags - Ballad (folk) and Ballad (jazz)

(Seems the jazz one would cover the pop stuff)

Use one tag for "A long song or poem that tells a story"

("slow romantic pop/jazz songs" can use the Slow and Romantic tags.)

We have two that fit that description, Ballad and Storytelling. In my mind storytelling would apply to spoken word pieces and/or introductions. But I suppose that's a separate discussion? And one I was getting to eventually. :) sparx (talk/contribs) 20:44, June 15, 2008 (AKDT)

I agree it should be a separate discussion. I wonder if we even need "storytelling" with the other tags? Kelli (talk/contribs) 21:28, June 15, 2008 (AKDT)

• Ballad - sparx (talk/contribs)
• Ballad - Atuuschaaw (talk/contribs) 11:45, June 19, 2008 (AKDT)
• Er, I think I'm in the right place to vote for keeping Ballad and letting the jazz thing be an amalgam of other terms. My reason is because "Ballad" is in popular use to mean "a long story" and even if we get rid of it, I see musicians describe their songs as "Ballads" all the time - even when they technically aren't. I think we almost have to have this term even if it is seriously mis-used. Jim (talk/contribs) 10:20, June 23, 2008 (AKDT)
• Ballad - I believe the ballad has a fine tradition of telling a story in verse form, but in our case it is sung. I like ballads.

Peterdale(Peterdale/contribs)*I am in agreement.. let's use ballad for a folk ballad like "The Blacksmith"... I am not sure who knows what Jazz ballads are.. I say keep it for the story songs that are those traditional story songs. LuAnna (talk/contribs) 11:58, July 3, 2008 (AKDT)

• I like the term "ballad" for story-telling song. Not all songs are ballads, but all ballads are songs that tell a story. Cater (talk/contribs) 19:08, July 5, 2008 (AKDT)

Delete Ballad

• I think this tag will always cause confusion and be used multiple ways, so should be dropped in favor of using slow, romantic, story telling, etc. Kelli (talk/contribs) 14:51, June 22, 2008 (AKDT)
• I think Kelli's right. — Mert (talk/contribs) 04:10, June 28, 2008 (AKDT)

Result

Though we are not in overwhelming agreement, we'll use the storytelling definition for ballad.

To reopen this discussion, please clear this current page then start the discussion. Add it to the Discussion topics page.

Thanks! sparx (talk/contribs) 18:20, July 8, 2008 (AKDT)

Request for information

I have to say I've been having similar thoughts on categories with more than one definition. I was just thinking about the Category:Driving. Seems to be a literal and implied defintion...tunes dealing with the mechanical aspects of driving, tunes which have drive, and tunes that are good to listen to while you're driving. And there could possibly be more definitions. I'm thinking this isn't unusual and there are many categories which have more than one definition.

Just from looking at wikipedia's list of Famous ballads, I can see that the ballads are broke into two categories: Traditional ballads which lead into the Modern famous ballads. I was relating ballads to stories. In other words, I always considered songs to be ballads...if the artist sings me a chapter out of life...(verses as paragraphs...and refrains as breaks between those paragraphs). But after looking at this list, I see many tunes that I probably wouldn't have tagged as ballads if given the opportunity. Seems as if a ballad can be attached to many music genres, each genre requiring it's own prerequisites to determine whether the song will be listed as a ballad. By having the genres folk and jazz as the only two, there would be many left out. Yes, I do understand that WWR plays more jazz and folk than many other communities. In other words, I'm just looking for directional confirmations...what was once black and white in my mind, has just turned battleship grey (Or is that gray? ... always leaned towards the e!

...I'm listening to the more learned when it comes to depth of database and how detailed the info should be. Do we know how deep? I guess what I'm trying to say is...Are we focusing on leaning down the database, or are we fattening it up? Leaning in some areas, and fattening up others? Is there a diagram...I'm southern...I need pictures! Atuuschaaw (talk/contribs) 00:34, June 16, 2008 (AKDT)

There's no diagram that I know of. The overriding principle is to tag songs in order to make shows. To me that means tags that are used on one or two songs are not useful. Like Eisenhower or William James. (Kelli has mentioned that we can use the wiki search engine to look for such words in lyrics or titles to find these songs. Maybe we could extend that to having a "search word" section on song pages. How that would work is that we'd type the "search word" in the body of the page, rather than a tag. One problem with this may be that the wiki search engine doesn't search for words under four letters (I think it's four.) and some particular words. An example is Songs:Industrial Park (14997). I looked for the lyrics last night, but didn't find them. So we could type some search words on that page, rather than tags with one or two members. I digress and I've not finished my first cup of coffee, so I hope that makes sense.)

Kelli's done a tremendous job organizing tag categories and descriptions. I'm interested to hear her thoughts on the matter. sparx (talk/contribs) 05:13, June 16, 2008 (AKDT)

Most of my thoughts are at Talk:Tagging though I'm sure I can come up with more. I moved the discussion and respoded there. Kelli (talk/contribs) 07:13, June 16, 2008 (AKDT)