An interesting reference to the song in an article on 'Borrowing in Celtic Music' by Allan Moore. I hope it is alright to post this passage here?

"I start at the largest scale – the borrowing of an entire song. I have been working with three versions of the song 'I will put my ship in order', part of a large family of Anglo-Celtic songs collected both in the UK and in North America under such titles as 'The Drowsy Sleeper' and 'The Silver Dagger'. The first of these versions was recorded by the band Ossian in 1984, the second by June Tabor in 1999, and the third by Capercaillie in 2003. It is a song about unrequited love, although the cause of the estrangement between the young couple who populate the song varies between the girl (in one of these versions) and her parents (in the other two). At least eight tunes are used traditionally for this song, but the tune for none of these three recordings appears in any catalogues I have found. The tune for the Ossian version was written by singer Tony Cuffe, to words from Ord's Bothy Songs and Ballads originally published in 1930, and this tune is taken up in Capercaillie's version. There are a number of subtle differences, of course, but there are a couple of quite significant ones too. Firstly, in the middle of the second and fourth lines of the verse, the melodic line drops by a fifth as sung by Karen Matheson, as opposed to the third present in Tony Cuffe's melody. This means that, for Matheson, the ensuing cadence is approached from below (^5 ^1 ^2), rather than above (^5 ^3 ^2). This seems to signify that the decision to 'sail her on the sea' (as the first verse has it) seems in Capercaillie's hands more the outcome of some inner struggle than a simple choice between two alternatives.

There is a more significant distinction, which lies in the accompaniment. At the point at which the girl points out to her lover that her parents will never agree to their union, the bass line changes, becomes higher, loses its emphasis on root positions and, combined with a change of vocal tone, suggests a greater degree of intimacy and perhaps resignation at this point. I could go on, but this should be enough to suggest that although both bands are performing the same song, the performances are shaped quite differently.

The original lyrics collected and printed in 1930 to the song 'I will set my ship in order' run to 13 verses. Of these, Ossian and Capercaillie take nine, tightening the structure somewhat. In this version, a girl refuses to unbar the door to her lover for various reasons – by the time she actually does so, he has departed. A second set of lyrics is widely available on the Internet (see e.g. Bluegrass Messengers, n.d.), to a song 'I will put my ship in order', only five of whose verses appear in Ord. This second set is the basis for June Tabor's version and it omits all the reasons for the man to shoot off before his lover has had time to unbar the door. If one compares Tabor's melody to the other two, one notices that while the first two phrases have notable similarities in terms of contour, the latter two are reversed (ABBA rather than ABAB), while the stress is altogether different – not "I will set" but "I will put", which makes the song one which describes action, rather than one which recounts the reasons which give rise to that action – hence also the needlessness of the explanatory verses.

So, three virtual performances of the same song. Two are very close, but offer subtly different interpretations of the lyric. The third, appearing historically between the others, is markedly different, but is still recognisably the same song. There is no sense of dialogue going on here. There are two streams of interpretation (two different versions) which, from this small evidence, do not interact. Although Tabor will have known the Ossian version, there is no obvious way that it impinges on her performance. Nor does her version play a part in Capercaillie's. There is not even a dialogue going on between the Ossian and Capercaillie versions, because Tony Cuffe died before Capercaillie put theirs down in the studio. It would be possible to argue that Capercaillie were, in some sense, 'signifyin(g)' on the Ossian version, as theirs is an acknowledged homage, but it seems to me so much clearer, and perhaps more pertinent, simply to invoke the theoretically more transparent notion of homage, and to observe the interpretive differences between these performances. These interpretive differences have, according to what records we have, been the stuff of this tradition for some centuries, however much there is now a call to contaminate them with modernism."