"Oh - be still my heart!"
Mine too - but I think that emphasises a problem with all these discussions
Songs like that are 'music' with words, and work superbly as such - take a narrative folk song like that and it would be diabolical
You favour American material, the traditional side of which is "word-based" (as Lomax's Cantometrics crowd entitled it) but not necessarily 'narrative'.
The thirties wrought great changes in American folk song, where the focus shifted from narrative to musical presentation, the words following the instrument rather than leading it
Personally, I love both, but I need to separate Dock Boggs's approach from Texas Gladden's when I sit down to listen to it
I suppose, as a Brit, that makes American songs approachable.
I remember a few years ago Peggy Seeger did a booking here in West Clare, she phoned us the day she arrived and we spent the afternoon together talking - part of it was her finding out what type of audience she could expect (largely a bluegrass/C&W crowd we thought from our memories of the club)
Pat and I asked her for a couple of her her unaccompanied big ballads - she somewhat dubiously agreed.
She started with her regular stuff, 'Handsome Molly', 'Cumberland Gap', 'Freight Train', et al, and was greeted with wild enthusiasm
She then sang 'Fair Annie' - one of her best 'biggie' and brought the house down - a brief silence, then thunderous applause
By the end of the evening she could have led the audience out of the door, up the road thirty miles and over The Cliffs of Moher.
Ballads heve been fairly easy to sing around here since, though you have to know where to place them
Jim Carroll