Golly, what a lot of words!
Just a couple of things to throw in, I've always tried to respect the original words of any song I've sung, and certainly not changed words to take a song out of context. However, the words are not, and should not be, set in aspic. They evolve, it's called the folk process.
I suspect if we could go back to the days of families singing round the fire in an evening, we would find that every family had their own version of almost any traditional song you could mention, I seem to remember a collosal number of verions of Barbara Allan.

FC