There is no "right or wrong" way of accepting any of these songs, it has to be a personal interpretation of a set of words from the point of view of the singer.
We don't know what gave rise to the making of these songs and in most cases, we don't even know when they were made, so we have to rely on the information that comes with them
The listener has to decide whether it works for them, but in the end, the minutia interpretation of the words is over-ridden by the performance - if it works, it works.
The outsider-researcher (observer) is in a different position altogether and stands to impose an outsider's view on the songs he/she has played no part in the making of.
In this particular case one of out best and most important singers, Sam Larner, went out of his way to point out to a collector the particular importance he attached to what appears to be a simple, passing phrase - good enough for me.
Sam, like most traditional singers I have talked to, visualised his songs - he saw them in pictures and it would be arrogant of any outsider to reject and dispute that picture - to reject a piece of information that we have been given from our source.
The fact that we know so little about our tradition is down to the fact that collectors and researchers have treated our singers as non-thinking sources of songs
It often seems to me that some of the "folk confraternity" have formed themselves into exclusive clubs to discuss our songs as sets of words (artifacts) rather than what they were a living, vital part of people's lives - we've lost the plot - literally.
It's not as if we are analysing two different interpretations from to different sources - we are imposing our own outsiders' interpretation on theirs because we think we know more than they do - a bad way to handle traditional knowledge.
I mentioned 'Lakes of Col Finn earlier - one of our most beautiful tragic domestic songs which has worked for centuries as just that.
A young man goes swimming in the dodgy part of a lake, is drowned, his friends and family search for him, pull his body out of the water, his lover laments his loss, he is buried - end of story.
THis is the interpretation imposed on it by a highly respected American academic:

From Lilith, the wild woman of perilous love, and Morgain la Fee, to the mood of a street ballad about one of the many Irish youths who have lost their lives in fresh water, is a long leap. But "The Lakes of Col Fin" takes it. Irish singers un¬derstand the lore of the ballad perfectly: Willie was not "drowned"; he was taken away to Tir fa Tonn, "Fairyland-under-wave," by a water woman who had fallen in love with him. Legends of similar content are frequent in Middle Irish literature and have survived into modern popular tradition. We may compare Motherwell's, "The Mermayden," whose "bower is biggit o' the gude ships' keels, and the banes o' the drowned at sea"—-a grim picture of the supernatural woman's cruelty in love, which the poet nicely caught—and Leyden's "The Mermaid of Corrievre- kan," with a happy ending wrought by a clever hero who inveigles the mermaid into taking him back to bid farewell to his former love, "the maid of Colonsay." Both poems were based on local traditions and legends.
Popular tradition, however, does not mean popular origin. In the case of our ballad, the underlying folklore is Irish de facto, but not de lure: the ballad is of Oriental and literary origin, and HAS SUNK TO THE LEVEL OF THE "FOLK" which has the keeping of folklore. To put it in a single phrase, memory not invention is the function of the folk.
"The Lakes of Col Fin" was first printed by Dr. P. W. Joyce in 1872, in a version, with the air, obtained from a County Limerick singer. A full history of the ballad and of the folk tradition pertaining to it is in FSSNE, Bulletin No. 8, pp. 9— 12.
Mrs. Flanders met this ballad as "The Lakes of Champlain" while talking about old songs with Mrs. Herbert Haley of Cuttingsville, Vermont. Mrs. Haley sang the words to the tune of "The Dying Cowboy" and had been told that the drowned boy was "Willie Lanard," well known to the person who gave her the song.
(Phillips Barry, Lake of Col Finn, New Green Mountain Songster, Yale University Press 1939)"
Academic gibberish imposed on a straightforward story by someone with too much time on his hands
He has the arrogance to say that the singers not only do the singers not know what they are singing but that they have corrupted the songs that have "come down" to them - their job is repetition, not understanding and interpretation.
It's no wonder we understand so little of our heritage as a part of our history.
Jim Carroll