I realise I am a serial complainer, but I'm afraid I find very little of the modern British renditions of traditional ballads particularly inspiring - for me, I find them 'performances' rather than interpretations for me, ballads are stories that happen to have tunes rather than vehicles for tricksy instrumental displays.
Would be delighted to be proved wrong
I find myself re-playing the old collections - the Riverside series, the early Folkways stuff, The Long Harvest and particularly 'Blood and Roses' if I want to remember what ballad singing is about - the traditional collections like 'The Muckle Sangs' still give a buzz though!
Ireland was never particularly noted as a source for Child Ballads, but the late collector, Tom Munnelly, counted 50 of them as being still extant among the older generation right into the 1980s - some of them rare survivals that had disappeared elsewhere in the English-speaking world - Traveller, Martin McDonagh's 'Lady Margaret' (Young Hunting) remains for me one of the finest example of traditional ballad singing I've ever encountered.
Many of these can be found on the recently re-released 'Early Ballads in Ireland 1968-1985'
A few years ago a Wexford Couple, Aileen Lambert and Mick Fortune, got the suppoort of the National Library of Ireland and organised a number of of lunchtime concerts throughout Ireland entitled, 'Man Woman and Child' - it worked wonders in reminding Ireland that it had a rich tradition of ballad-singing - it's no longer uncommon to hear them sung arounfd nowadays
Jim Carroll