Sorry to revive this but I intended to respond to Malcolm Douglas regarding singers speaking the last line before I went away and didn't have time.
Of course he is right, I should have said during the thirty odd years I have been recording source singers it seems to have gone completely, none of the ones we recorded did it and the only time I have seen it is from younger singers in a concert situation; it seems to be a performance flourish rather than a response to the song.
I can't remember it occuring on any of the field recordings I have heard (did it happen on the BBC ones Malcolm - I don't recall it?) though I know it was once a common practice.
For me the comments traditional singers made on their songs, during or after were far more significant: Sam Larner's interjection of "you know what they are, don't you?" in Butter and Cheese and All, or Harry Cox's bitter comment "And that's what they thought of us" after singing Betsy The Serving Maid, or his diatribe about land seizure following Van Dieman's Land.
Then there's Dillard Chandler's description of what he'd have done to Lord Daniel if he had been Little Mattie Groves!
It seems to me we know very little about what traditional singers felt about their songs; god knows, there are little enough examples of them being asked. These comments seem to me to fill a gap in some small way,
Jim Carroll