"I find it very strange when a female starts 'Oh me name is Davey Lowsen' spoils the whole picture for me. Sorry."

I know what you mean, but that very strangeness, or spoiling of the picture, is one of the things I've come to value and enjoy about trad songs.

The picture gets "spoiled" quite often in the course of many a song, simply cos the narrator/viewpoint switches so often, like in a movie.

Sometimes when you're hearing a love song, and the gender of the singer and the gender of the addressee are unspecified for a few verses, when you finally hear a "he" or "she" it can be a bit of a jolt, but that can be a good thing, i think.

Yes, it changes a song from direct experience to a story, something that happened a long time ago, to people utterly different (& yet not so different) long dead.

I always liked the fact that the Star Wars movies began with the rather wistful introduction "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away". A bit Brechtian really.