Broadside printers were very good at the changing place names thing. There's a 19th century broadside ballad I know as "Liverpool's an altered town"; but change a few words here and there and you've got "Manchester's an altered town" and "Preston's an altered town" - all by the same printer (Harkness of Preston). Clearly in this case they weren't 'errors', just adaptations. But this was a 'new ballad' being printed. I guess the question here would be; is changing the scene of a song with a long history an "error" or an "adaptation"?

Thinking back to songs I know and the place-change adaptations they may contain, most people who I've heard singing "Black is the colour" sing it with the words "I go to the Clyde and I mourn and weep", following Hamish Imlach's rendition of the song. Is this a perpetuated error, or part of the folk process? I'm inclined towards the latter, especially seeing as I heard and learned this from pub singing long before I heard the Imlach recording (so I didn't really know of the source of the "Clyde" reference for a long time; it was just part of the oral transmission). But I'm inconsistent, because there are other changes that frustrate me, because they lose sight of the history or place that gave the song life.