_When I was twenty-two, I lived in a roach-infested two-bedroom on the fifth floor of an eighty-one-year-old apartment building in Brooklyn. Some nights, when her metalhead boyfriend was stuck working at an Irish bar across the city, my roommate Molly and I would stay up late watching YouTube videos that made us cry. It was a mixed-up time in my life: I was partying too hard; I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to date men or women; and between an unpaid magazine internship and a full-time gig flipping burgers, I was working seven days a week. I was confused, I was always tired, and my hair smelled like cooking grease. The elevator in our building only sometimes worked.

And so we chain-smoked and watched old videos of Sally Field accepting her second Best Actress Oscar for the 1984 film Places in the Heart. We watched Stockard Channing confess that there were worse things she could do in the open-air hallway of a Los Angeles high school. We watched Billy Crystal sprint through Manhattan after realizing he loves Meg Ryan, a clip that features Frank Sinatra’s take on “It Had to Be You,” which was arranged by the singer’s longtime collaborator Billy May and appeared on the 1980 concept album Trilogy: Past Present Future. But more often than not, we watched and listened to big, slow, melodramatic love songs—like Whitney Houston’s 1985 performance of “Saving All My Love for You” on The Late Show with David Letterman; or the music video for “Stay,” Rihanna’s duet with the Louisiana-born musician Mikky Ekko; or versions of “My Heart Will Go On” that overlay the instrumental passages with dialogue from Titanic. Once, Molly wept so hard watching a video of a twenty-eight-year-old Dolly Parton performing “I Will Always Love You” that she popped a blood vessel in her eye.

When the editors decided “Ballads” would be the theme of our 25th Southern Music Issue, the songs from those videos were some of the first that sprang to mind. But of course, not all ballads are sad and slow. The term has historically been used to describe a sung narrative set to melody—story songs with long verses passed down through oral traditions, with lyrics that change depending on where the singer calls home. “Murder ballads” tell tales of death and wickedness; the lyrics were sometimes sold as printed broadsides containing specific details of a gruesome crime and its aftermath. Even the more contemporary definition of the ballad form—often characterized by an unhurried tempo, a sing-along chorus, and a wistful mood—has dozens of genre variations and subcategories, including but not limited to: sentimental, soul, protest, pop, gospel, jazz, country, hip-hop, heavy metal, and power. The notorious tale of “Stagger Lee,” a nineteenth-century Missouri pimp who shot a man in a saloon on Christmas, has been interpreted as a folksong, a blues ballad, a chart-topping r&b record, and more; it is referenced in three separate stories in the issue.

In putting together this magazine and its accompanying CD, it felt important to highlight this nebulous quality of ballads, to spotlight a wide range of creatives who push the form forward and keep old traditions alive. And yet, in spite of this inclusive approach, certain motifs emerged, not least being the boundless ability of ballads to bring people together across region and time, from the shaded porches of rural Mississippi and Appalachia to the unpaved roads of a tiny village in Brazil to professional recording studios overflowing with cigarette smoke and magic. In her essay about the gorgeous duets that our cover star Roberta Flack created alongside Donny Hathaway, first-time OA contributor Ashawnta Jackson writes: “These celestial beings were always destined to meet.”

Cosmic moments of human connection fill these pages. In a short memoir, Ed Pavlić details how songs by artists like Anita Baker and Patrice Rushen scored a formative and intimate friendship between two men in the ’80s. In “More Than What You Made of Me,” Gaby Wilson travels to Houston, where Filipino Americans gather in karaoke clubs to hear and sing covers of acrobatic showstoppers—especially Beyoncé’s “Listen,” the Dreamgirls ballad that has unexpectedly acquired emotional and cultural significance within their community. In “Blood Harmony,” contributing editor David Ramsey follows a murder ballad across centuries and continents—but it’s really a story about people: the ones who inspire a ballad and the ones who keep its tune safe in the pockets of their hearts.

Elsewhere, our writers illustrate how ballads have shaped both the history of popular music and the personal histories of their lives. “Ballads allow hip-hop, a genre known for edge, to buckle with feeling and fall on its knees seeking mercy momentarily,” explains Harmony Holiday in “Getting On”, a spellbinding lyric essay about the groggy Madvillain track “Accordion.” Lauren Du Graf tells the story of prodigious jazz pianist Shirley Horn, one of Miles Davis’s favorite vocalists, whose considered approach to life and career mirrored her hypnotically slow singing style. “The Final Gift,” written especially for this issue by the Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist and old-time music performer Dom Flemons, demonstrates the ballad’s resilience in American art and beyond; it’s published here in poem form, while its musical counterpart closes out the Ballads Issue CD compilation.

In another one of our features, Craig Seymour paints a beautiful posthumous portrait of Melvin Lindsey, the D.C. radio personality who died from complications related to AIDS in 1992. As the host of the Quiet Storm at Howard University’s WHUR-FM, Lindsey originated an amorous, sophisticated, vibe-heavy format that was nationally duplicated and resonates culturally to this day. As Seymour reminds us, Lindsey’s late-night selections—and rich, warm radio voice—spoke directly to a generation of queer listeners who heard subtext in those carefully curated r&b ballads that others may have missed. “I can’t help but think he was revealing a bit of himself, sitting alone each evening in the radio booth, when he played Norman Connors’s ‘You Bring Me Joy,’ sung by Adarita (Ada Dyer) [and made famous by Anita Baker], with its lyrics, ‘I’m so lonely at night / And I’m mixed up again…’”

When I was living in that apartment, listening to melancholic music wasn’t a new phenomenon for me: I grew up in an era when schmaltzy love ballads filled the airwaves, and I spent my early teens obsessed with melodic punk tearjerkers by emo groups from Florida and the Midwest. And yet I’m not confident that I could have articulated why those insomniac YouTube binges became such an important ritual, not back then at least. With some distance, I’m able to recognize how good it felt to cry on purpose, and how rare it was to have some control over the things that made our hearts ache. There was also something comforting about listening to those songs with a friend, about experiencing loneliness without actually being alone. I hope this issue provides a similar kind of comfort.