I had no intention of putting J M's Lucy Wan to the rack and thumbscrews, or did deride it – my response was to somebody putting it up as a good piece of ballad singing which I don't believe it was.
It may be quite true that rap treatment to a story such as this could work, I don't believe it could using the existing texts of ballads because of the way they are so tightly structured that if you miss anything - even a few words, you can lose the whole ballad. Dick is not alone in needing to get out more; there are many of us who have difficulty in following the words.
Anyway, this isn't 'rap', rather it's a hybrid; it starts off with a (rather mannered IMO) unaccompanied voice, moves into a rap, then ends up with one of the most intrusive pieces of accompaniment I've heard in a while. I have great difficulty taking it seriously due to its schizophrenic structure. For me a comparison not too far from the subject matter is Oedipus Rex - far closer to Tom Lehrer than to Sophocles.
Cards on the table; after thirty odd years of fieldwork I have no doubt whatever that, apart from a tiny handful of 'custom songs' and those sung at sporting gatherings or in the schoolyard, the singing traditions of these islands are as dead as Monty Python's Norwegian Blue. They died when people stopped making songs that reflected their lives and events of their communities and passing them on to enable others to adapt them to serve the same purpose; they died when they/we sat back and let others make their/our culture for them/us, becoming passive recipients of a manufactured 'product' culture rather than relying on the innate talents we all posess.
Walter Pardon said he saw it disappearing in his area in the early thirties when his contemporaries turned their backs on the family songs and took up the latest in popular music, leaving the older members of his family to sing the old songs at Christmas parties until finally they all died. The songs would have died with them if he hadn't taken the trouble to systematically write them down and memorise the tunes on his melodeon.      
The singing traditions died here in rural Ireland in much the same way with the disappearance of the 'cuirt', the inter-neighbour house visit, usually held in the kitchen, that was the natural home of singing, dancing and storytelling.
The Travelling communities, due almost entirely to their rather isolated life-styles, were the last to lose their traditions, finally surrendering them to 'the box in the corner' in the mid-seventies.
They didn't 'evolve' into anything else; they were replaced with shop-bought culture. If they had 'evolved' they would have been re-defined, researched and documented and somebody would have been able to point to that research, re-definition and documentation, rather than rely on 'folk and tradition are what I say they are', or 'what happens at our club', or 'what the man-in-the-street says it is' (in my experience, the man-in-the-street says little on the subject, but is content to leave it to those involved).
Sure, family sing-songs still happened – and happen, and pub singing (television, piped music and pool permitting), and all the other gatherings where people socialise, and sometimes these include our old folk songs - they always have; Victorian tavern gatherings, the Vauxhall Gardens 'fringe', (even as early as actress, Mrs Knipp who sang the old Scotch ballad, Barbara Allen for Pepys) but this is very different from the vast repertoire of songs that were created and re-created by working people to articulate their lives and feelings and aspirations.
Our culture got 'Barry Bucknalled', shifted up into the attic to make room for newer, disposable stuff that we no longer had a hand in creating. It is argued, here and elsewhere that this is a good thing, that the old songs no longer have a use simply because they are 'old'. If this is true, I hope they leave enough room up there for Shakespeare, and Homer, and Dickens, and Bach…. and all the other stuff that has reached the end of its shelf-life.
For a long time the clubs saw the value, as a social resource, as a means of self-expression and as entertainment, of hanging on to the old songs, their functions and their methods of creation and re-creation, and it was great while it lasted. But, if threads like this are to be believed, that's been shifted up to the attic too, to be replaced by something that is more akin to the store bought goods – and every bit as disposable - if this is true, pity, we've abandoned a great source of self expression and creation.
I don't believe it's gone entirely; Bryan Creer keeps telling me it's still around. If you want to see it in action, I see two of the great exponents of traditional singing at its best, Kevin and Ellen Mitchell are booked at Long Eaton on 2nd May to show how good it can be when someone sets their mind to it, wish we could be there.
Now - as our OP said earlier - talk among yourselves - I'm off to clear some land drains if the good weather holds up.
Jim Carroll