I find Jones's remake vebose and totally unnecessary, it over-eggs one of the most beautiful ballads of domestic tragedy
Enough damage was done to this ballad by the academics who threw in huge handfuls of folkloristic nonsense, along with a pinch of contempt for the folk-songmakers to add to the damage
The American Irish singer of the version below had more Child Ballads (15) in her reperoire than any other source singer I have encountered
Jim

From The New Green Mountain Songster, eds Helen Hartness Flanders, Elizabeth Flanders Ballard, George Brown and Phillips Barry (1939)
Lakes of Col Finn - Mrs EM Sullivan, Vermont
"From Lilith, the wild woman of perilous love, and Morgain la Fée, to the mood of a street ballad about one of the many Irish youths who have lost their lives in fresh water, is a long leap. But “The Lakes of Col Fin” takes it. Irish singers understand the lore of the ballad perfectly: Willie was not “drowned; he was taken away to Tir fa Tonny “Fairyland-under-wave,” by a water woman who had fallen in love with him. Legends of similar content are frequent in Middle Irish literature and have survived into modern popular tradition. We may compare Motherwell’s, “The Mermayden,” whose “bower is biggit o’ the gude ships5 keels, and the banes o5 the drowned at sea —a grim picture of the supernatural woman's cruelty in love, which the poet nicely caught—and Leyden5s “The Mermaid of Corrievre-kan,55 with a happy ending wrought by a clever hero who inveigles the mermaid into taking him back to bid farewell to his former love, “the maid of Colonsay.55 Both poems were based on local traditions and legends.
Popular tradition, however, does not mean popular origin. In the case of our ballad, the underlying folklore is Irish de facto, but not de lure: the ballad is of Oriental and literary origin, and has sunk to the level of the “folk” which has the keeping of folklore. To put it in a single phrase, memory not invention, is the function of the folk.
“The Lakes of Col Fin” was first printed by Dr. P. W. Joyce in 1872, in a version, with the air, obtained from a County Limerick singer. A full history of the ballad and of the folk tradition pertaining to it is in FSSNE, Bulletin No. 8, pp. 9-12.
Mrs. Flanders met this ballad as “The Lakes of Champlain” while talking about old songs with Mrs. Herbert Haley of Cuttingsville, Vermont. Mrs. Haley sang the words to the tune of “The Dying Cowboy” and had been told that the drowned boy was “Willie Lanard,” well known to the person who gave her the song.
Note Phillips Barry