Martin Carthy has spoken regularly and often
about how important it was, for him,
to hear Bob Dylan singing this ballad in England
when both of them were young men.

Not a question of accurate versus inaccurate,
but a question of length:
will an audience sit still for a ballad that long?

Because Carthy was in a position to know of
more than one traditional, old ballad, in English,
that could be compared to "Hattie Carroll"
in length and in drama.

And so Carthy took in the audience's sober reception of Dylan's song,
and thought,
if an audience will receive "Hattie Carroll" respectfully,
they might listen to the really old stuff as well.

Martin Carthy, like Dylan and Ochs, took his hard knocks
from the music business as well,
and he was another one who preferred to soldier on
and hold himself together
rather than do the poète maudit thing.
And of course he would see some of his English contemporaries
whose careers, and lives, ended far sooner than they ought to have done.