Yet another thread I happened across while prowling in the "parody" cluster...

First, as to "filk" - no, that's a much broader category/niche than just SCA music. The term was coined, so the story goes, decades ago by way of a misprint in a science fiction convention program book, and now "filk" is a general term for the music of the broader SF/F genre fandom community, encompassing the whole range of media from movies to TV to film. Originally most filk was folk-ish in origin, but nowadays there are significant influences from rock and even classical music (I have an album by a Pacific NW performer who is mostly not even a vocalist, but a cellist and mistress of other stringed instruments.)

There is a long and venerable tradition of parody within the filk world; two of the premier practitioners thereof are Tom Smith and Bob Kanefsky - Bob especially is known for extremely intricate and specific parody lyrics.

Now I've written a considerable number of song lyrics under the filk umbrella, but very few of them are purely or directly parodies. And it happened some years ago that Bob Kanefsky and I found ourselves co-judging the onsite songwriting contest at a local sci-fi convention, wherein Bob and I got to talking about what he does and what I do.

And the coinage I came up with is that Bob is a parodist, but I'm what I now describe as a "hymnalist" - that is, I almost always write my lyrics with an existing tune in mind (and I borrow from a great variety of sources, from filk to folk to show tunes to actual hymns), but my lyrics frequently have little or no connection to those associated with my source tune. For instance, one early lyric was written to fit a setting of Kipling's poem "A Smuggler's Song" by Michael Longcor, but the words retell the legend of a well-known native petroglyph here in the Pacific Northwest.

I draw the "hymnalist" coinage from the wide use of just this sort of adaptation in Western Christian musical practice - as I noted in a different context/thread elsewhere this past morning, it's extremely common either for Christian hymns either to be sung to more than one tune, or for more than one popular hymn to be sung to a single tune. (Note too that "the Lone Ranger theme" and "the 1812 Overture" refer to the same piece of music, and that the Christmas song "What Child Is This?" is not just also "Greensleeves", but overlaps the theme from the "Lassie" TV series.)

As long as authorship of both words and music is properly credited in any published or commercial context in connection with a given song, I see no difficulty with any of this.