Whose written down versions?

When I Google "reef and reif" for "Banks of Newfoundland" I get 26 hits. But the other details of the songs often don't match, so I assume they're not simple copies.   

For instance, in one they're washing mud off the dead man's face, in another it's blood. After they do that, sometimes it's
Heave to beat the band
other times it's
and haul or you'll be damned,

In one of them Jack Lynch is from Ballynahinch, in another from Malnahinch.   

... and so forth.    Of course this is the nature of folk music.   As I mentioned recently, I'm collecting lyrics to put into the "lyrics" tags of my MP3 traditional folk music collection.   I always start by Googling to find the closest match to the words the singer is singing, to minimize the editing I have to do.   But I would say at least 90% of the time I can never find a perfect match.

Anyway, I think I'll assume "reif" is an error that got propagated because people were unsure of their nautical knowledge and were afraid to change it.   Recently I ran into another example of this where I found several (but still a minority of) instances of lyrics in a different song quoted as:

It's on we all sail wester likewise your oilskin frock

My guess is that it was supposed to be "sou'wester" but the "sail" version got propagated through the magic of the internet.