Brian - "try to forget completely the way they did it, and start again from scratch with words and tune"

Absolutely. But in a way, that's where I came in! If the only version of Two Pretty Boys you've ever heard is Bellamy's - or if you've only ever heard his version of On Board A 98 for that matter - what is the tune? It's not a matter of an interpolated bar of 2/4 here or a bit of rubato there - there's no consistent metre at all. What he did is brilliant, no question about it, but he didn't just put his stamp on those songs, he painted his self-portrait on them.

I think this is an extreme version of a more general issue in revival singing; I call it the Early One Morning Problem. The problem is, nobody wants to sound like they're singing Early One Morning. (Paper idea: "Singing Together - blessing or curse for the English tradition?") Unfortunately a lot of traditional song tunes are really rather pretty, particularly if they're regularised and neatened up a bit. So, as well as leaving them un-regularised, people tend to go the other way - stretch out the metre, leave gaps for emphasis, accentuate the drama and mystery.

Nobody roughened up a song tune quite like Bellamy did, but lots of people did (and do) this. I learned Lemady from Tony Rose's version, which isn't especially showy, and I'd been singing it for years before I realised what a pretty tune it is - and that was only after I'd made a positive effort to sing it with a regular metre, more or less to see what would happen. (And then I heard Bellamy's version, which is a whole different story!)

I guess the lesson is just to go back to the source(s) wherever possible! As I type this, thanks to Youtube I'm listening to Lucy Stewart singing The Twa Brothers - electrifying, and (more to the point) metrically regular, despite being recognisably the same tune as Bellamy sang. (Which is interesting.) And perhaps there's also a lesson there about the difference between emulating the process and imitating the results.