"Do you mean the Irish or the English tradition, or both?"
Irish, English and particularly Scots, with its emphasis on big ballads.
All are narrative based, to one extent or another - every one of the older singers we interviewed described themselves as storytellers, in every case the words took precedent of the tunes.
"Why on earth would so many old songs and ballads have choruses and refrain lines if it was not normal for people to join in?"
It was normal for everybody to join in - on the choruses.
If our tradition was a choral one we would have known about it centuries ago and the structure of our songs would have reflected that fact - as it is, it seems to be a purely 21st century phenomenon.
For me joining in is evidence for me that those who do so hae no interest in what the singer is doing.
"Walter Pardon may not have liked the way people joined in his choruses"
What happened to Walter's songs was that, once again, some audiences just weren't listening to what he was doing, they were more interested in what they wanted to do and they dragged the songs down to a pace he was not used to - the height of bad mannered insensitivity. You should always defer to the singer, just as you should never try as an individual musician, to push the pace of the playing, as described by Steve Gardham
I think it had far more to do with self-indulgent audiences rather than the church
Jim Carroll