Jeri,

Part of the point is that you CAN copy a Tennyson poem on a copy machine because publication and copyright have allowed you to obtain Tennyson's exact words. You can read them. You can recite them. You can give them to others to read or discuss.

Why should a writer who writes songs not have the same copyright and publication rights as a poet or essayist or novelist? (We don't)

With songs it's a crapshoot: if you are Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell you have had the luck and power to establish your original work as the primary version -- the one that will get heard somehow. If you are unknown, obscure .... And if you are also a singer who sings traditional material and belong to a folk community of some kind you may have to put up with all kinds of nonsense about "the folk process"
misapplied to non-traditional songs by living writers.

As a singer, I am primarily an aural/oral learner: I learn most things by listening to recordings or live performances. I can, however, read
and forums like this one and others make it easier and easier to track down authors of particular songs, which means that I can do any writer the respect of listening to her or his original material. If I like it well enough, I can continue to sing it. If I find I am frequently changing something about it I can query a living author about this and discuss the change. I might even learn something.

The idea that if I like my own work well enough to insist that it is treated respectfully I should only sing it in private interferes with one of the great joys of writing, which is that of communicating experiences to others.

Whew!