this is traditional music, I think, and to talk of the 'original' version and then disapproving of modifications to that 'original' just miss the point, this is a music of constant change not frozen in time

"Sammy's Bar" is about a particular place and time. The story is one that could have happened anywhere, but the point of the song is to make a connection to Malta as it was experienced by the sailors of the British Navy after WW2. ("Dirty Old Town" is much less specifically about Salford - it could be about any decaying industrial city, Detroit or Miskolc would do fine).


I don't doubt that Miss MacLeod existed but the tunes were not delivered to yer man Kerr in Scotland nor to the other one in the mid-1770s in a flash of light by the Angel Gabriel. It was almost certainly already in existence in some form.

She was Mrs Macleod - I said what the antecedents of the tune were; if the reel-time version existed before the mid-1770s it would have been written down. Scottish musicians were good at that. And Kerr names the composer of the Bluebell Polka - F. Stanley, whoever that was (Kerr only gave composer credits to a fraction of the tunes he published, so he must have been certain about that one). If you think it wasn't totally original, let's see your precedent.