Oh dear. I get very annoyed when having to fight through the thickets of Sweeney's gratuitous and sesquipedalian philological exhibitionism which demonstrates a far more condescending (as well as obfuscatory) approach than ever displayed by Victorian collectors or revivalists.

It does however seem to me curious that while he rejects the entire tenet of folk music, denigrating a very sensible definition (the 1954 definition) without offering any coherent other options, he sees himself as able to define which of his offerings are folk and which are not.

On the other hand, it also seems to me that while a ballad may well be a narrative (and may or may not be a folk song) if it is a narrative folk song then no way of presenting the narrative deprives it of that status, given that folk is not defined by form. Indeed I could go further and say that even if it were to be deprived of its ballad status by removal of all coherent narrative, it might well still remain a folk song. For example so much of "Avram Bailey" appears to have been lost that what we have left makes very little sense.