Thanks for fixing my plague of italics, Kat.  As to the "folk process", I was making a general point, since I obviously have not seen what alterations your friends may have made to their texts, and have no idea in what kind of communities they grew up.  The term gets used a lot round the Forum, and I certainly believe that it is often used carelessly, without any real informed understanding of what it actually means.  Baring Gould and Marson, for example, were considerable scholars and conducted a great deal of "field research", but their re-writing of traditional texts was in no way a part of any folk process; they were setting themselves up as mediators of tradition -in essence, as more important than the people who actually maintained and practised that tradition.  I would say that exactly the same is true of bowdlerisation or any other kind of deliberate re-writing of traditional texts today where it is intended to change their meaning; it feels to me like an intentional falsification of the historical record, no matter how well meant.  The fact that a person may have a good grasp of traditional idiom may mean that their re-write won't sound too awkward on the face of it, but it won't be a traditional song any more, and should not be represented as such.  I wouldn't dream of saying that anybody has no right to make such alterations, but I would say that anybody who does this is doing just what many collectors of a century ago did, and with no greater justification.  When I say this I am speaking specifically of the sort of alterations discussed in this thread; my comments should not be taken as extending to what I would call the "genuine" folk process, which is too complicated an issue to deal with here; I've already "crept" the thread quite far enough!

Malcolm