EKanne:
David Buchan put forward the interesting suggestion that there were no set texts to ballads, but yhey existed as stories, commonplaces etc. and the singers would improvise each time they sang them.
Don't think he proved his point fully, but fascinating all the same.
One of the exercises we were given in the Critics Group was:
a: to read a song as a piece of poetry - did wonders for the phrasing.
b: to tell the plot of a song as if you were telling it as a story - a great way to analyse and make sense of anything you might have missed.
Jim Carroll