There are good ballads and bad ballads - or I should say ones that interest me and ones that don't. Just like there are some Dickens novels that I really enjoyed reading and others (generally the earlier ones) that seem a bit like hackwork to me.

There does seem to be one hallmark of the ballads that do it for me personally: they have a sense of the epic to them. Done well, like Martin Carthy singing 'Willie's Lady' they can seem like a magic spell or a cathartic tragedy. The repetition, the fact that they do take a long time, that's all part of it.