Sorry to have 'hijacked' this thread, but I am convinced that these aspects of ballads and songs are essential to our understanding of them before we end up down yet another blind alley.
Another bit of 'hijacking' to hopefully add a little light relief to the gloom these arguments invariably throw on the proceedings - you might like to try it yourselves sometime - good fun.
When I moved to London in 1969 to join The Critics Group, a number of members took me under their wings to make me feel at home and show me how the group worked; these included John Faulkner and Sandra Kerr, who regularly invited me to go with them to clubs where they were booked to perform.
Occasionally this involved longish trips out of London, so to relieve the tedium and keep ourselves awake we played and even invented word games to break the tedium of the journey, one invention was the re-titling of ballads and songs such as, 'Folk creatures' like 'The False Kite on the Toad' or 'The Outlandish Kite' or 'Terrapin Hero'
or:
'Folk Foods' like;
'The Dowie Dens of Marrow' or 'The Unquiet Gravy' or 'Scarborough Pear' or 'The Derby Yam' or 'Turra Meercat' - all good harmless fun until we nearly came off the road when somebody came up with 'Hang Down Your Head Tandoori'.
Peggy Seeger had not long written a rather delicate anti-racist song entitled 'Hello Friend', which had a first line "Hello friend, I see you're a stranger" - I don't think she ever found out that this became "Hello fiend, I see you're a strangler".
Dozens and dozens of these on several subjects which went on for quite a while until one night we were heading to a club a fair way out of London in particularly heavy traffic, when we decided to relieve the boredom by 'doing a job' on an entire song - 'Riddles Wisely Expounded' which, with very little effort, we turned into a crude cum bawdy cum erotic piece verging on a rugby song - fine, except John and Sandra had it on their list to sing that night and, rather unwisely decided to include it because they needed a longish song with a chorus that would involve the audience.
In front of a somewhat bemused crowd they corpsed their way though half a dozen verses, breaking down at every bit of the ballad we'd changed.
We laid off the game after that.
Sorry to have interrupted - carry on.
Jim Carroll