MMario - how do you figure out if you're playing someone's arrangement if you're not doing a faithful reproduction of the dots/key/instrumentation?

Even in cases where I've started with the sheet music from an artist I'm using as a source, by the time I get around to having it polished enough to sing, I may have changed keys, chord placement, tempo, use of repeats, possibly even words. With ballads, in particular, I may have heard a dozen different variants of say, "House Carpenter" - and what I sing is descended from Pentangle, Joan Baez, Peggy Seeger/Ewan McColl, one verse swapped in from Dan Kedding, melody mushed from wassisface from WV... Sure, the chords LOOK like I'm playing from the Joan Baez songbook - but she wasn't playing an autoharp with the hammer-on kinda thing I swiped from Dave Rice.

Where does one draw the line on SPECIFIC, LEGAL attribution to an individual arrangement or merely saying "from the singing of her and her and him and him and them and these other guys" on lyrics that have their roots in public domain & particularly those with no attributable author?

Re: Rise up Singing copyright - if they're as "good" at that as they are at chords and words, I'd double check for accuracy. I've found both vary considerably from what I have in sheet music for things written in the last 50 years. Copyright there may be like words and chords and sources - a place to START, not the definitive source.

Joanne in Cleveland