'Marge:
"suppose the wisest thing is to regard the printed broadsides as a snapshot of a song, showing how it was sung at a particular time,"
Ballad scholar David Buchan went as far as to suggest that, within the ballad singing tradition there were no set texts but just plots and a number of commonplaces and conventions.
He proposed that a ballad singer took these and re-composed the song each time he or she sang it.
I don't believe he made his case completely, but it's an inriguing thought.
Jim Carroll'

Well I think it is the case. The New Deserter folksong was altered from Prince Rupert to Prince Albert, and presumably fell out of use when we stopped the practice of flogging deserters. If you wanted to grab an audiences attention - surely you would be writing about stuff that was happening nowadays. History relegates or demands the re-arranging of the form.

If you did a murder ballad - say about the fred West case or the recent Joanna Yeates case - while the relatives still mourn, while the world is still reeling from the shock - then perhaps you would not recreate what an earlier generation did, but take it to another place. A more modern place. who knows?

Ewan MaCcoll tried to do something with his songs about Derek Bentley. maybe even dylan with his Hatties carrol song. Ewan got a good kicking from the newspapers - who accused him of bad taste at the time, but perhaps that indicates he was on the right track. Hanging an innocent man is not in good taste, it leaves a bad taste.

I suppose in Ireland, in the recent troubles they tried to reinvigorate the old finger pointing style of the great rebel ballads. And I think they have had some success.

In conclusion, if you see a young man or woman trying to rewrite the old Vietnam songs to take in Afghanistan and Iraq, I would ask older folksingers to be patient and not accuse them of navel gazing. they may be getting it wrong, but they are wrestling with the form, and i think that puts them on the side of the angels.