"I think he [Tony Rose], Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, and other performers of that ilk have ruined more songs than they've enhanced with heavy-handed or unnecessary (albeit extremely skilful) accompaniment."

Hang one, Jim, you're talking about three of my early ballad influences there! But each to their own.

Good comments about conversational style in singing. I've been known to make workshop classes recite song verses as if conversing - it's an interesting exercise. It's also interesting to try to sing a song with the word lengths governed strictly by the note durations, and hearing how awful it sounds. However it's actually quite difficult to sing every word of a song precisely as you would speak it, and in practice it ends up being some sort of compromise. It's also worth remembering that highly ornamented singing, like sean nos style or that of your own Bill Cassidy, is working in the opposite direction to the conversational, with the ornamented syllables being stretched right out.

jennyr - regarding musical ability, what you say is one good reason for keeping accompaniments simple.