You all have come up with a really good solution. Ballads and time-clocks are antithetical. Ballads are meant to while away a long winter's night, and as Sheila Kay Adams says, can easily have 99 verses. If the words are audible, these long stories in song would be well worth hearing and enjoyable in a relaxed setting.

Some editing on the part of the ballad singers (and chantey and pub and, and) would be good though. Some verses don't move a story forward and are merely repetition. Hearing, "I went to the East...tidy tidy tum, I went to the West, tidy tidy tum, I went to the North...tidy tidy tum", etc -- for ten minutes is boring even if we are doing a chorus, no matter how much time is allotted for the workshop.

We are fortunate to have a number of people at The Getaway with deep knowledge of ballads and who are skilled at singing them. We have more people who want to get to hear some of these and who know one or two they'd like to do themselves, but they shy away from getting "stuck" in a ballad workshop knowing their chances of actually singing one are pretty nill. Your ideas would fix that dilemma.

On a different note: I heard a comment that, "The Getaway was wonderful, but I'd have liked it more if there had been more Blues and/or Bluegrass".