Sid: The Ballad of a Soldier: adapting and developing the radio ballad for live performance

'Sid: the Ballad of a Soldier: adapting and developing the radio ballad for live performance' is a PhD Creative Writing thesis consisting of a creative work and a critical study. The creative work, Sid: The Ballad of a Soldier, is an intermedial performance piece, approximately two hours in length, combining live music, spoken word, recorded speech and music, set against a changing backdrop of images including photographs, maps and excerpts from the letters of Sidney Verrier, my uncle, written while he was a soldier during the Second World War. The critical study both contextualises the creative work and reflects upon the various processes leading to it. Conceptually, the creative piece originated as a collection of songs linked together with spoken introductory and background material, deriving from the radio ballad form evolved by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger between 1957 and 1963, and subsequently by Jon Leonard and others, and from the performance practice of folk singers. Radio ballads, however, rely heavily on the oral testimony of those who participated in the events recounted; Sid’s story is that of one soldier amongst millions, whose direct experience of five years of war service is evidenced only by his own handwritten letters, necessitating a new approach to the radio ballad form. The critical study thus examines the evolution of the radio ballad genre, the use of spoken word by folk song performers and a common feature of both: an underlying theme of authenticity. The critical commentary offers the first proper definition of the term ‘radio ballad’ and explains how, in order to present Sid’s story to a live audience, it was necessary to incorporate a visual element alongside the musical and spoken word components, giving rise to a new evolution of the radio ballad concept.