With ballads the pact is definitely between the performer and the ballad

Interesting stuff, WLD. However - as a storyteller & singer who tells & sings only traditional tales, folk song & balladry (especially), I believe that such material carries various & richly complex levels of meaning & experience that ultimately only the listener might ever become aware of, and even then not necessarily on a conscious level. I see this as something of a collective meme however so subjective the experience; a hidden something or other that is very often the catalyst for a more eldritch communion.

I always make bloody sure the hills of heaven & hell are in there on account of the beauty and power of the imagery. Here the ballad crosses that point of actuality into the explicit realms of otherness which has been implicit throughout the rest of it. It's the juxtaposition of the natural & the supernatural that makes it work - the human experience that suddenly faces the consequences. As an atheist I don't believe in heaven or hell, but as a Neo-Gnostic Marxist of a particularly dualistic bent, I feel it is the dialectical moral tension that drives these ballads along irrespective of the action per se.