Uncle Sam”s song, I Don”t Ever Wanna See You Again is a song about a guy who gets his heart broken by his girlfriend. In this song Uncle Sam is singing directly to a girl who was once the love of his life. He tells her that he never wants to see her again because she was a secret lover of his best friend. This song is a lot like a ballad in many ways. It uses a refrain, which is called the chorus in the lyrics. The line, “I don’t ever wanna see you again,” is used repeatedly through out the song. Lines two and four rhyme, which is the basic format for the quatrains. It is about disappointed love and jealousy which most early ballads were written about. “I Don’t Ever Wanna See You Again” was written to be sung like all other ballads. The French word for ballad once meant dance so people probably once danced to the rhythm of the ballads.
In as many ways as it is like a ballad, there are just as many ways that it is not. I In this song there are no quatrains with eight syllables in the first and third line, and six syllables in the second and fourth. This example shows the quatrains as having six syllables in the first and third lines and five syllables in the second and fourth lines.
“It took me a minute,
To wake up and see.
What the love of my life,
Was doing to me.”
This song does not use a narrative format because of its use of “I” and “Me.” All of the ballads we have read were told in third person. It uses no incremental repetition. The song also has parts of it where as it is not in the quatrain form, where it is only a group two lines that rhyme. At the end of this song there is a part where Uncle Sam stops singing and starts talking to the girl. In this part there is no kind of structural format. Ballads were stuck with the same format through out the whole thing. This is another reason why it is dissimilar than a ballad.
