For the last however many years, I have sung my own material, mainly parodies or other humorous songs. Over the last year or so, I've been slowly introducing some "proper" songs into my repertoire.

A lot of the "standards" are already "spoken for" in the sense that someone in my Morris side or local club has already made the song their own. So although I practise those songs for "training", I've been trying to find other songs for my own repertoire, and mainly choosing songs that I've seldom or never heard performed at a club or in a session.

So imagine my dismay when almost without fail, when I unveil a "new" song, not only does almost everyone else in the room know it, but they also know a significantly different version: either a different chorus, or a different tune, or sometimes both.

This is made worse when some individuals insist on singing the verses as well as the choruses, and when they insist on "helpfully" singing their "more authentic" version loudly enough to "correct" me mid song.

The amazing variety of versions is part of the tradition. Take a "bog standard" song like "Lowlands" and there must be dozens of variants. Sometimes the protagonist is male, sometimes female. Sometimes it is only three verses, sometimes 8. Sometimes the verses are rhyming couplets, and sometimes a single line repeated.

But surely, the version that the singer is singing is the only one that matters **at that moment**. And unless it's an "all join in" (like "Rolling Home") then the singer does the verses, and the group only does the choruses.

In my previous incarnation as a folk club regular, in the 1980s, I do not remember this being an issue.

Or am I being crabby and unreasonable?