I discovered this 3-month-old thread thanks to a reference from a more recent discussion, which pointed to Jim Lad's thorough and very interesting explication of his understanding of this very lovely and mysterious song.

I'm surprised that his "correctness" was challenged, and very much surprised that anyone would consider the song to be "ruined" by this ~ or any ~ interpretation.

I would venture the opinion that Jim is indisputably "correct" insofar as his understanding of the song is something he learned from the tradition whence he came ~ his family and the larger community of they were a part. Perhaps other groups have passed down versions of the song with minor but meaningful differences in the lyrics because their shared understandings of the song may have developed differently over time.

Having just "digested" or internalised this particular backstory that I just learned today, I am now much more likely to try performing the song myself. Only now might I be able to infuse every obscure, archaic line with meaning. Earlier, I was certainly able to enjoy listening to a haunting air with vaguely mystical lyrics, but I could not possibly have sung the piece with any level of conviction, with any idea of what I might be trying to communicate.

Anyone else who prefers to understand the song's tragic story in therms of parental diapproval, etc., rather than disease, more power to you ~ especially if your understanding allows you to bring your own feelings to your effort to pass the song along via performance.

As for myself, I may be more prone than most to adopt Jim's intrerpretation because my own late father lived with tuberculosis, and survived for many years enduring the aftermath of the surgery that "cured" him by removing a lobe from each lung. In the mid-20th-century Irish-American community, his disease no longer held the stigma that was once the case back in the old country, but because we were so aware of the disease, everyone in our family certainly knew about TB's historical association with shameful poverty.

Another angle: if and when I start to sing the song, and certainly whenever I hear it from know on, it will be impossible not to think about the very recent plague of incurable sexually-transmitted disease. Not part of the "tradition," certainly not anything intended by the author(s), but an inescapable subtext now that the world has changed (as it always does).