OK, Lox, let's agree to friendly debate - my "anything else would sound ridiculous" was perhaps not the most diplomatic or tolerant phrase either.

Lox: "The quotes around "relevant modern form" are there to highlight it as an expression representative of a particular perspective, though not necessarily your own, and not to put words in your mouth."

The reason I seized on that was precisely because that perspective is one I've fought against myself in the past. Attempts to make traditional songs jump through a hoop marked "relevance" (a highly subjective notion anyway) always make my own hackles rise.

I'm sure the poem you quote would sound better in Jamaican patois. I don't think I'd be the best person to perform it like that, but if you wanted to I wouldn't make a fuss. However, in the specific case of Child Ballads, what we're dealing with is not only regional dialect (though not always) but archaic language as well. I have a ballad on my desk right now that's in archaic *English* and which I'm trying to arrange in a way that makes sense. Some would maintain that, say, Chaucer sounds best in the language he wrote in, but my job here is to make the ballad understandable to an audience - one which is expecting musical entertainment - in such a way that a long and complex story grips them. A line like "When bale is att hyest, boote is at next" just has to go.

Presented with lines in heavy Scots dialect (I go for English versions where possible but some of the best ballads weren't collected here) I would likewise want to make them more understandable, but in undertaking my revision I'd be doing my level best to retain the "flavour and charm" of the original. A member of the Scots diaspora might consider the dialect to be a part of the flavour and charm, but that is not my perspective. Besides, if you look at what happened to the ballads as they moved around in oral tradition, between Scotland, England and Ireland, or over to the Appalachians, resetting the words in the local vernacular happened all the time. I can think of ballads collected in Scotland and later in North Carolina, in which much the same story is told, but scarcely a single line of the older text has survived.

Scots people are indeed open and friendly, and are generally better clued-up on their musical traditions than we are South of the border. They do, however, have a powerful sense of nationality, and for a visiting Englishman to adopt a phoney Scots accent, even in the cause of poetic authenticity, would be to invite ridicule or possibly worse. Believe me.

I have sung the Welsh song in Wales, but I can just about get away with that because I have the excuse of my family background. Even so, I have had a little friendly advice about my pronunciation....

During the 1980s I was resident at a club in Manchester run by the late and great Harry Boardman (at one time an acolyte of Ewan MacColl, to claw my way back to the original topic). Harry had done the full "sing from your own tradition" thing, and unearthed a large repertoire of old Lancastrian material, some of it in thick dialect. He was himself from Lancashire and, though not naturally a dialect speaker, could use it convincingly in performance. Harry also enjoyed Irish songs, and would on occasion sing one in a cod Irish accent. It might be argued that for him to adopt the Irish accent was no more phoney than singing in a dialect that had largely died out, but to me the former sounded bogus (and I would tell him so). Harry's more usual dictum was "sing in your own voice", and that's what's always made the most sense to me.