"SORROW SONGS" (BALLADS)

In Pennsylvania's past, as in other American cultural regions, when a tragedy occurred – a murder, suicide, or natural disaster – local poets, usually schoolmasters, wrote ballads about it, had them printed, and then peddled them to eke out their meager incomes. Ballads are narrative songs, telling a simple story with no more than three participants. In German they were called Trauerlieder – "songs of mourning," or, more commonly, "sorrow songs.

"WICKED POLLY" IN GERMAN AND ENGLISH. "Wicked Polly" was a party girl from York County who enjoyed dances and revelries, despite the warnings of her more decorous friends. Believing in eleventh-hour conversion, she frolicked to the end and took sick before she could repent, her soul "lost and doomed to Hell." Her story was told through this often-reprinted broadside.

THE SUSANNA COX BALLAD IN GERMAN AND ENGLISH. The most popular, widespread, and reprinted of all Pennsylvania's German ballads told the story of Susanna Cox, an unmarried serving maid living on a farm near Kutztown, who did away with her illegitimate baby. On June 10, 1809, she was hanged on Gallows Hill at the end of Penn Street in Reading, before a crowd of some 20,000 eager spectators.

THE BOHEMIAN FARMER ASLEEP IN THE WOODS. Yet another cautionary tale was this ballad in which a farmer cut down a tree on the Christian Sabbath, thereby mocking God. Much later, the farmer was found sitting on the stump, asleep but still smoking and sweating. Unable to move the sleeping man from the stump, villagers erected a pavilion over the site as a warning to others against committing blasphemy. The ballad moralized that "God issues frightful judgments on those who wantonly slander Him and desecrate His Sabbath."