Brian, I don't know Dylan's "North Country"; is it a variation of the trad. song "The North Country Maid?" S&G's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" developed after Paul Simon hung out in England with a bunch of England's folk revivalists in the 60's. He took Martin Carthy's guitar arrangement of a traditional British ballad and blended it with his own lyrics (the "Canticle" part) and copyrighted the whole thing - without giving Carthy any credit for the guitar part, of course. Dylan has done much the same thing on a fairly regular basis. "Singout!" magazine mentioned in a review of his recent acoustic album that Dylan ripped off Nic Jones' arrangement of "Canaday-I-O" among others. A lot of commercial musicians seem to think that if the song is trad. or public domain, it's fair game, even though an instrumental arrangement was worked up by a particular modern artist. This is one reason why so many "folk/rock" performers started copyrighting their arrangements of traditional songs as "Trad./arr. by", although even bands like Steeleye Span are none too careful about crediting their sources (ask Louis Killen about "Blackleg Miner" sometime...) The American collector/folksinger, John Jacob Niles, numbered AND copyrighted in his own name all the ballads he collected from various original singers.

Anyway, a lot of traditional songs contain similar lines or verses, sometimes called "zipper" verses, that drifted from song to song while they were passed around through the oral tradition. Then a contemporary songwriter gets a hold of it and confuses the issue even more!

So, take "copyright" claims on variations of traditional songs with a grain of salt...frequently all the copyright performer has done is taken a trad. song, changed a couple lines or done a particular instrumental setting, then claimed "authorship" of the whole shebang.