Sorry, didn't mean to leave it like that.
I wonder what people get from an approach like that to what is essentially a piece of high tragedy.
For me, the strength of the tragic ballads lie in the sparseness of the text, the stripping away of all the surplus so you are left with just the bare facts which serve to communicate the tragesdy, with the refrains (those that have them) adding a sense of inevitibility.
Moray's version starts off fairly straightforwardly (bit too bland for me), and then he appears to become bored with it and goes off and does something else. It's like the Steeleye version of Lamkin, where they break off from the story part of the way through and play an Irish reel - 'they lost the plot' as they say.
There's nothing 'wrong' with doing what he/they did - but ballad singing it ain't, it has become something else.
Personally, if someone is going to muck about with our songs and ballads I'd much rather it was Vaughan Williams, or George Butterworth, or Percy Grainger, or Aaron Copeland... or all those who used them to create something else entirely with an identity and integrity of its own.
Moray's version, for me, is neither fish nor fowl - it's Hamlet on roller skates. And the ironic thing is, of course, is it's all been done before and, for me, sounds so 'old fashioned'. Steeleye, Pentangle, et al... (they called it 'folk rock, or electric folk); Laing, Dallas, Denslow and Shelton covered it quite well in 'The Electric Muse'.
Jim Carroll