I thought the term 'cantefable' might lead to some discussion. It is one I had come across but not thought deeply about.

By googling I found an Oxford Refence definition from Oxford's A Dictionary of English Folklore which is specific that the term refers to a mostly prose piece interspersed with short songs.

The OED online is interesting on the term 'cantefable'. It is first found in an old French piece which calls itself a chantefable, and the cantefable spelling came later and seems to have co-existed with the earlier. The French piece was Aucassin_and_Nicolette and was a prose piece with some interspersed singing. It is often seen as a parody of various genres including our old friends the 'geste' and the 'romance'. If Wiki is right that is.

It therefore seems likely, I would suggest, that uses of the term to refer to what are basically songs/verses with a bit of prose between verses/stanzas might be much later, ie made up by a 'new crowd'.

Interestingly, the examples of used given in the OED dictionary include one from a US journal in which Leadbelly's 'talking blues' are called by that name. So the term seems to have been applied to a range of quite different 'texts' in more modern times.

These are just a few scraps of information, not meant to be a definitive or comprehensive history of the word and its many usages. Happy to be corrected if wrong.