I find the practice of speaking the last line, or more commonly the last half line, quite an attractive way to bring a song to an end. It breaks the atmosphere in which the song exists, and returns you to normality by using everyday speech pattern. It is a singer's rather crafty way of saying he or she has woven a spell over the audience, and now here we all are back in the real world again. Good storytellers have lots of devices which serve to restore 'normality' at the end of a tale.

Nice to see Emerson Woodcock's name mentioned in this thread; he had some Irish ancestry on his mother's side, I think, so that is probably where he got the practice from.

Matthew