Sminky,
I don't have any objection to accompaniment per se - I used to sing to a friend's accompaniment all the time (being instrumentally illiterate myself). When we ended our partnership through my moving away, I felt as if I had lost an arm and there were a number of songs I dropped from my repertoire for a long time. When I finally did come back to them I found I had to re-think the the phrasing completely as I had allowed the accompaniment to dictate the way I performed - the accompaniment hadn't accompanied, but rather, had dominated my singing.
It's the type of accompaniment that breaks up the narrative of a song I find intrusive and unnecessary - you know - line of song - line of music, type of thing. It happens all the time with singer/sonwriter stuff, and, to my taste, far too often with traditional material.
When we were recording the older singers, time after time they told us that they considered themselves storytellers whose stories had tunes - that seems largely to have disappeared.
The most spectacular example of what I am talking about was Steeleye Span's recording of the ballad Lamkin. Half way through the action they appear to become bored with it and play an Irish reel - now what's that about?
Jim Carroll