Hi Liam!

I wrote somewhere else a while ago that...

"Singers come in 3 categories: those who tell the tale precisely as they heard it, those who would only occasionally alter certain details to clarify the message, and those very individualistic singers who stamp much of their repetoire with their own trademark."

If you look through the great collections of folk songs, you will see evidence of the above. It's particularly noticeable when you look at North American variants of songs that migrated from Britain and Ireland. Some, for example, place names changed to American locales and others corrupted place names. John Moulden wrote here in a thread about The Greenfields of Canada here not long ago that Paddy Tunney had contributed quite a few phrases to certain of his songs. Another great, the late Joe Heaney, did not do that.

All the best,
Dan Milner