Traditional singers. like anyone else, had different, and not always even self-consistent, attitudes to their songs snd their repertoires. I remember Harry Cox, on my first of several visits to him with Bob Thomson in 1970-71 [see Topic's Bonnie Labouring Boy collection] relating with indignation that he had heard singers introduce the sympathetic plants {'Church top ... twined in true lover's knot'} motif in 'Barbara Allen':— "They get mixed up," he exclaimed, "That shouldn't come in 'Barbara Ellen'. That don't belong in that. They belong in 'Lord Lovely!'" {See my transcription on p8 of 'Folk Review', February 1973}.

But he was nevertheless well aware of the existence of variants and different versions, though he didn't always recognise resemblances between tunes. When he sang us 'The Ship Called "Onward"', his version of 'Rounding The Horn', he asked me if I knew a song like that and what was my tune? So I sang him a verse of the Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs 'Amphitrite' version [the "Set up all new rigging, boys, And bent on all new sails" verse], pointing out that it was like his tune for "Henry Abbot the Poacher", and, as Bob chimed in, "The Painful Plough"; but he didn't, as Bob said in the car going home, appear to register the resemblance of the tunes, or even that his tunes for 'Abbot' & 'Painful Plough' were identical.