Singing the News: Ballads as News Media in Europe and Australia, 1550-1920

Across Europe from the 16th century onwards, ballads were a primary medium for disseminating information about newsworthy events. Cheaply printed with simple images, set to familiar tunes, transported around the countryside by peddlers, and performed on busy streets and marketplaces by street singers, ballads combined news, entertainment and moral lesson in a format designed for maximum dissemination, whatever the literacy rate. They are therefore excellent sources for examining how the general public – rather than just educated elites – were encouraged to understand the society in which they lived.

Taking advantage of several recent major digitisation projects, including the National Library of Australia’s Trove database, Singing the News will unearth, study, and record songs in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian from the mid-16th through the early 20th century. Categories of news will cover disasters and wonders, politics and satire, military conflicts, and crime and punishment. The project will reveal for the first time not only the universal, widespread nature of news-songs, but also show how audience participation in singing helped to create a consensus and social cohesion around topics that could potentially be controversial.

Focusing on the particular image of national identity proposed by the ballads, the project will extend this exploration of a European tradition to 19th-century Australian newspapers, revealing how they commissioned songs to consciously invent a romanticised image of the fledgling colony. The project's open-access database will contain hi-res images of the ballads, transcriptions, translations, and (where the music is known) recordings.

Singing the News will give a voice – quite literally – to the first real ‘mass media’, demonstrating how the news has always sought to manipulate our emotions.