Seems there are lots of people who want to tell other people what to do one way or another. My advice would be to trust your own judgement not somebody else's.

As for understanding the song. Most of these were written by people in another time living very different lives. You can understand the words, you can feel emotion brought from the music and story, but how much your experience has to do with what the person writing the song was feeling is conjecture. You can only understand the song from your own cultural perspective and what & how you sing might seem completely wrong to the original source.

ETO