'Sandy Paton once told me I was full of crap on this topic, and Sandy was about as easy going as they come' wrote LonesomeEJ above.

Not always he wasn't. I'll never forget being in a London coffee bar with Sandy & Redd Sullivan & some others 50+ years ago. Sandy was holding forth about "no racism in folksong; you'll never hear the word {Look away, Azizi!} 'nigger' in a true traditional folksong". So I sang the first verse of Johnny Come Down To Hilo: "Did you ever hear the like since you was born, When a big buck nigger with his seaboots on Sings Johnny Come Down To Hilo? Poor old man". - "That's right," said Redd, a professional merchant seaman as well as a distinguished folksinger; "and that's how seamen sing it too."

But Sandy asserted that it wasn't a 'true traditional version', whatever TF he meant by that; couldn't possibly be, by a question-begging circular-argument=back-to-where-we-came-in assertion: & just wouldn't be told. Easygoing? Not always where he felt strongly: like most of us, I suppose.