McG of H,

I take your point... I think it depends (at least partly) on how important the details are to the song.

If the important thing is that there was a man walking in the wood and what he looked like/what he was wearing doesn't really matter - great!

The thing about "Jean hitched north to Don's Bait and stole a Wall Street Journal" (although it's made up as an example, so we don't have it in the context of a song) is that it gives you the kind of context that might well be useful during the rest of the song. It's not just that those words tell us what happened - they do double-duty: giving us a certain amount of insight into the character and place in question while also telling us what happened; saves having to tell us separately that (for example) Jean didn't have a lot of money to spare, etc.

In your example above, I'd suggest that although we are indeed told the forester was angry, we are also shown how angry he is by his words/intention to hang this man. But you're right, we probably don't need to know what kind of coat he was wearing when he said it.

The other thing about "John was angry" vs "John slammed the door, etc" is that it takes less time to say, and time is certainly of the essence in a song. The important thing is not to waste words - whether it's describing things that don't really need describing, or using words so efficiently that one line will tell you as much as 2 (or 3 or 4) less well-written lines would.

A good song (like good poetry) is very dense/distilled - packs a great deal of meaning into not that many words. Brings to mind Hemingway's comment about a short story being like an iceberg...

Cheers,

YY