GUEST Old Brown's Daughter
I think I've read/heard/noticed that the old Appalachian ballad singers seem to owe some of their style to sean-nos.
Mrs Lemon
It's not just you.
A traditional singer doing an unaccompanied song with eyes wide shut can be quite traumatic if you're not used to it. The intensity, the emotion, the "no net" feeling, the starkness can be very discomfiting. Modern audiences with no previous experience sometimes don't know how to deal with it.