Like Crow Sister, I'm a little (but perhaps not very) surprised by the negative tone of many comments here.

Yes, it's bad manners to sing an eight-minute song in a time-limited singaround.

Yes, there are times where a piece that demands full audience attention is not going to work - like when they're all drunk, or expecting some light entertainment.

Yes, there is a particular kind of tedium about a badly-performed ballad.

But, having conceded all that, I think Valmai's description "magnificent and spellbinding" pretty well sums it up. These are the greatest songs of the folk tradition - no argument in my book. If you like a great story (OK, not everyone does) then you should be riveted by a good ballad performed well. That said, they are by no means all bloodsoaked forty-verse epics - there are funny ones, short ones, singalong ones - but the real meat is in the big ones, like Tam Lin, False Foudrage, Willie's Lady, Kemp Owyne, and so on.

How to sing them? Well, number one, know the ballad absolutely off by heart. The fellow with the scroll well deserved having a match set to it. Learn it and live it. Experience the emotions as if they were your own. Be excited afresh each time you sing it. It's no accident that pretty well all of my favourite ballad performers are experienced, mature singers who have got inside their ballads over decades. But that doesn't mean that you can't do a good job now.

Go and listen to some great ballad performances. Phil Tanner's 'Henry Martin'... Geordie Hanna's 'Young Edmund'... Hear the aforementioned Mike Waterson performance of Tam Lin, then go and hear Frankie Armstrong do it, or find Bert Lloyd's recording of the same ballad. They are quite different in style - Tanner is exuberant and melodramatic where Hanna is understated and sinister, Armstrong is right in your face where Lloyd is weaving the most delicate of tracery - but all share a complete committment to the ballad in hand. Ballad singers are often asked whether they see the movie in their head as they sing - well, listen to Tanner's Henry Martin and then tell me that he isn't seeing the movie! And you're watching it with him. Why? Because he believes in it completely. There's no point being half-arsed about a ballad: wondering whether it's too long or you should be singing it a bit faster or doing a fancier accompaniment (generally the answer is NO!) or whether aspects of the storyline are a bit unbelievable (fairy coaches don't really turn into pumpkins at midnight!).

There are sometimes a lot of words to learn, but they tell a coherent tale, so they're easier to remember than a bunch of floating verses or a modern stream-of conciousness. With a bit of experience you soon learn how to make up something approriate on the fly, in the event you do dry. Find an appropriate overall length when fashioning your ballad, but don't go down the road of believing that all the repetition is superfluous and you can chop it out - that's often where the power of the ballad lies. "Mesmeric entrancement" can be good, but so too can expressiveness.

But, for now, just go and sing them (somehow I think you've already made that choice). Pick your moment carefully, at least until you get more confident. And, the more you do it the more you'll find out how to do it.