With regard to giving the last line of a song "parlando" (hope that's right!), this was a feature of performances by the first traditional singer I ever heard "live", when I was a child and he was already an old man. I noticed it in performances by several others over the years, and, in some songs, now do so myself. This I originally did because, well, it seemed appropriate, and was obviously a feature in Irish singing. However, a few years back, I heard on a Radio programme that this practice goes back at least to Ancient Greece, and was intended to signal a return from the exalted realm of Poetry and Music to the mundane. Anyone else heard of this, and what do you think of the idea?

Mind you, my mother said that, when she and her brothers and sisters heard the same singer doing the same thing back in the nineteen-thirties, they all just thought he had become tired...