"Singing isn't speaking"
No it isn't, but one of the greatest idiosyncrasies of traditional singing is that quite often the narrative doesn't make sense - breaking up words so they simply don't make make grammatical sense (syntax) or leaving gaps in the narrative to fit a line or to accommodate accompaniment (the latter being certainly the most common nowadays)
I don't think this to be common with source singers, though there are a few who have done it, or even made a 'style' of it.
English language traditional songs are in the main narrative and every traditional singer we have ever asked as told us that he/she considered themselves storytellers whose stories happened to come with tunes.
Walter Pardon was particularly insistent on this and believed that it was not worth singing a song unless you could also identify with it in some way.
Before he 'discovered himself' for the revival, Walter had not sung in public, not even at home among family gatherings "except Dark-Eted Sailor - nobody else wanted that!"
Instead, he dedicated his time to preserving his family's songs, memorising them and writing them down and establishing the old tunes by playing them on the melodion.
A noticeably habit on his early recordings was his tendency to hold onto last words of each verse for a little too long - listen to the Leader albums.
When he became used to singing this disappeared.
Tom Lenihan, another great, large-repertoire singer, described little tricks to make sense of the narrative when it was difficult to fit it into the musical line - running on lines and, where necessary taking a snatch breath as soon as he could so as not to interfere with the sense - slight humming sounds to fill in poetic gaps, particularly on the beginnings of lines....
One of the noticeable features about the interviews we did with Tom was that he found it virtually impossible to tell the story of a song without constantly lapsing into singing it and invariably he abandoned any attempts to do so by surrendering to just singing it - his singing had become part of his natural speech.
Jim Carroll