Suibhne O'Piobaireachd wrote:

"This is a myth that's cropped up a few times here; but as both a storyteller & a ballad singer I'd say that storytelling is something very different indeed...

with ballads the words are already there... the finely honed verse really needs no more from the performer other than to let it through."

I feel that statements to the effect the singer is a mere vessel for the ballad ("you don't sing the ballad; the ballad sings you") are themselves mystical mythologising. The singer is making decisions all the way along: whether to raise or lower the volume, to harden or soften the timbre, to lengthen a pause or to march briskly onward, to slide or to hit the note dead-on, to ornament in a particular place, and so on. It's possible that, if the singer really 'gets lost in' the telling of a ballad, some of those decisions may become unconscious, but many of them are willed - unless you are singing in the most deadpan monotone (and it's another myth that deadpan is the 'correct' or 'traditional' way to sing ballads).

Listen again to Phil Tanner's 'Henry Martin'. His performance has many of the qualities of a storyteller. He changes his timbre, rolls his R's, gives certain words sonorous gravitas (when he sings "down to the bottom she goes" you can tell from the way he delivers the single word 'bottom' that she's not coming up again!) and uses ornaments sparingly but flamboyantly on certain key passages of narrative. Listen to the conspiratorial tones, the throwaway asides, the half-spoken passages and the barely-suppressed guffaws of Sam Larner's 'Butter and Cheese and All' to hear great storytelling in song (albeit not a Child Ballad). And cast your mind back to Peter Bellamy's performances - eyes rolled, lips curled, hands gesturing, attitudes struck - to find an example of the storyteller's physicality in a singer. The two arts are not the same (clearly the storyteller has much more leeway with the words), but they have plenty in common.