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Originally Posted by JonPR
That's not my point. You're right about the evolution of the song - https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/son...emonlover.html - but it doesn't matter where he got it from.
What I was getting at is what he did with it, and the intensity of his performance. He made it his own, in the same way that Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker made old blues songs their own - and highlighted the intimate connection between British traditional music and the blues by using slide.
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I don't agree, I think it matters a lot where he got it from, it's 100s of years of social history behind that song.
That doesn't sound like an English folk song anymore it sounds like a song that's had a couple hundred years of being sung to a banjo accompaniment which has forced a very different kind of phrasing and changed the melody.
English folk songs come from a tradition of un accompanied singing that American version almost sounds like a dance tune.
I've just ordered the Doc Watson Family CD referenced in your link to see what their Appalachian traditional version sounds like.
If your interested in links between European history and the blues that whole meeting the devil at the crossroads thing is supposed to go back to Nordic and Saxon myth, when the Romans left here the Saxons interpreted their straight roads as mystical Ley lines across the landscape and crossing Ley lines were places of dark power.