There are conscious changes and then there are the unconscious ones. I've had experience with my songs of both. Nic Jones changed the words of "Icarus" to make some of the words more the way he spoke and thought. I don't think he ever asked my permission to do so, but on the other hand he was reaching bigger audiences than I would have done and on balance I felt it was better to have that change than have my song stay sacrosanct but little known. People who learnt the song from Nic's version took those changes on, without necessarily knowing they weren't singing the song the way it was written. When I met Martin Simpson (who had already learnt the song from Nic via Maggie Holland) he asked me to sing him the song so that he could hear how it "should" be, but then he subtly altered the rhythms and chording, and I can generally spot who has learnt the song from Martin as a result. Neither of these sets of changes is sufficient to count as a separate arrangement, however, or to become copyright in their own right.

And then there are the people who have learnt a song and not fully remembered it, so there are some interesting variations around on my song "Moth" which have destroyed some of the internal rhymes and the imagery. I'd love to be able to stand on a soapbox and denounce this kind of thing, but the reality is it would be impossible to track down each and every example of it happening and ultimately as long as they credit me for the song I suppose I should just be pleased that they wanted to sing it in the first place. I'd just prefer people to hear the crafted version of the song rather than a garbled version, in case anyone thinks I wrote the garbled one!

I did have a good conversation once with Roy Bailey about my song "Red Riding Hood", because he felt I was letting men off the hook too easily with the way I'd phrased it initially. I didn't adopt his suggested changes but I did alter the way I sang it from then on to take account of what he'd said - I don't often take too much notice of people's suggested changes to my songs, mind you, but Roy does know about songs and singing and messages embedded in the texts.

Often when people come and suggest different words I'm afraid I tend to take the view that if they wanted the song to say that instead of what I'd written, then they should just go away and write their own song, because I've generally taken a lot of time and trouble to write the song the way I want it to be.

Anne Lister