"Sounds to me like Sladen or somebody else went to work on the text with a will....."
Sorry - been away - why should any one individual have "gone to work on it" with or without a will?
Seamus Ennis had an equally bawdy/obscene and inventive Irish version of it - that's the folk process for you!
Too many unqualified suggestions of late on what the folk process did or didn't do to songs in my opinion.
Jim Carroll