It's very simple - If a song is in copyright (and it is for 70 years after the death of the composer) then to alter or change the lyric or melody (and I'm not talking about the interpretation of the melody here), is breaking the law. This could only be done if permission has been granted by the composer and publisher. Real Folk Airs is a different thing. The great composers very often wrote works based on folk melodies. These melodies were just there. They had grown out of the people themselves over many years, and nobody knows where they first came from, there are no official writers credited with the writing of them. Don
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