You know as well as I do Joe that the communication of poetry and prose isn't just the understanding of words - narrating sense, good grammar and pronunciation are all an essential part of communication
You can turn Hamlet's soliloquies into doggerel if you decide to send them up
In addition you have voclal tone and effort - a little more difficult to explain but an essential part of communicating the sense of a story
Traditional singers tend usually to sing as they speak - anll the punctuation in the right place, no unnecessary gaps, no breaking up or unnecessarily extending words (as happens here with the line of oooo's
I'm not saying for one minute that yours ia an unacceptable rendition, I am saying if it ain't narrative it ain't folk

Baccie
Please don't you start on the '54 kick - leave that to Dave - I'm not a 54 adherent and I have never known any
I've never used it and I'm not sure I remember what it covers fully
Our song tradition died sometime in the 19th century - Sharp and his crowd saying they were racing to beat the undertaker
W no longer have an oral tradition connected to songs - that a diminishing number of folkies might decide to make something else of the songs is a self-conscious act often acknowledged by copyrighting 'versions' of folk songs
For it to be part of a tradition you need a folk process that allows new things to be absorbed
Once you change the utterance of a song it becomes something else
Jim