Ballads

You might think the sultry rhythm and blues vocal quartet Jodeci has it all.Thousands of adoring female fans.Financial success, including homes in exclusive Englewood, N.J.And a future that promises more. Their debut album, "Forever My Lady," has sold 1.2 million copies, and their current single, "Stay," is No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart.There's only one problem: The parents of two of them want them back home -- in Charlotte, N.C., -- singing the gospel music that inspired their career.

GEORGE GOBEL, the sad-eyed comic with the flat-top haircut whose battles with his television wife, "Spooky Old Alice," added a dimension to domestic warfare in the 1950s, died yesterday.Sam Honigberg, his friend and publicist for nearly 40 years, said Gobel had had a series of strokes, which left him unable to walk, and had undergone surgery nearly a month ago to see if his mobility could be improved."He may have had another stroke," Honigberg said. Gobel died at Encino Hospital in Los Angeles.

Toward the end of their concert in Philadelphia this month, First Aid Kit addressed the crowd: "We want to try an experiment. " For the past hour, Klara and Johanna Soderberg, the two Swedish sisters who make up the band, had been performing the kind of music that can be best summed up with the word "lovely. " It is Americana by way of Stockholm, pretty ballads and melancholy anecdotes sung in two frail, harmonious voices over quivering basslines. The duo was playing Union Transfer, a cavernous former rail baggage depot and my second stop on a visit to Philly's abundantly rich music scene.

Judging from the sound of Steelheart's first hit, "Never Let You Go," it would be easy to believe that the quintet's debut album is full of soft ballads."

Think "Toni Braxton," and a couple of things inevitably come to mind - saucy hits like "You're Making Me High" (about satisfying her desire for a man) and her unforgettable 2001 Grammy night dress, little more than a strategically placed long, white scarf. She laughs with a tinge of embarrassment when these are now mentioned, however. It's not that the daughter of a Maryland preacher doesn't want to keep pushing the sexual envelope and flaunting her God-given assets. It's just, well, she has other considerations now. In the time since her last album - 2000's The Heat - she's gotten married, had a son and now is pregnant again with another boy. "Songs like `You're Making Me High,' I would have to explain that to my boys when they get older," the Severn native says by phone from her home in Los Angeles.

Six months ago, the members of Mr. Big were beginning to wonder if they weren't becoming Mr. Forgotten. Sure, the band's second release, "Lean Into It" was an even better piece of work than its first; the trouble was, nobody but the band and a smattering of its fans even knew the album was out there."

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVESOriginal Motion Picture Soundtrack(Morgan Creek 2959-20004)Considering how much money a successful soundtrack album can bring in, motion picture scores these days are cast almost as carefully as the films themselves. Take the soundtrack to "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." Being a historical drama, most of its score is in the traditional movie-music mode, offering more mood than melody with its sweeping strings, woodwind doodles and explosions of brass. But because traditional movie music doesn't sell, there's also a designated single -- "(Everything I Do)

"How can a man measure himself?" asks Horace Tabor, fallen tycoon, in the final scene of "The Ballad of Baby Doe," which opened Thursday night at the Washington Opera. It's a pathetic question coming from a man once so rich and powerful, but it summarizes his character's self-indulgent actions.Douglas Moore's English-language opera, set in a booming Colorado mining town of the 1880s (with a scene in Washington's Willard Hotel), premiered in 1956. It retells the true story of Tabor's sudden fortune, his scandalous but sincere second wife, Baby Doe, and the hubris that led to his downfall.

Folk ballads were the soap operas of their time -- tales of good and evil, religion and superstition, tragedy and comedy, spiced with sex and violence, says a Catonsville woman who has used needlework to create a pictorial tribute to the old songs.Today, Phyllis N. Rowe, 76, presents her "Ballad Quilt," with its 25 applique panels, in a program of music at Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville, where she lives.The oral ballad tradition that existed for centuries in the British Isles before colonists transplanted it to America took root and flourished, mainly in the Appalachians.

Mason Sebastian of Shady Side is a capable musician who has for some reason decided to make his living playing traditional folk music in the age of rock 'n' roll.Toward that end, he has just released an album, "By Request," featuring songs of the British Isles and Australia, produced in Edgewater and completed in Washington. A veteran of previous recordings with other groups in the early stages of his career, this marks his recording debut as a soloist.In terms of the material, "By Request" is an unconventional work.