Banjer, I met Wayne Erbsen about twenty years ago (at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins WV) and he's one of the best pickers & fiddlers I've ever encountered. And a real nice guy. So maybe I wouldn't mess with old lyrics the way he did--what was the original line that he changed anyway?--but my favourite quote source, Dick Gaughan, is worth hearing on this: "I believe traditional music is strong enough to be able to absorb successful experiments and reject those which are unsuccessful. Traditional Irish music survived Cromwell, it survived the famine, it survived mass emigration, and it's capable of surviving anything I, as an individual, can do to it." (Sing Out! Vol 30 #2)

All the good songs are somewhere in the middle of the moral scale that has "sickeningly sweet" at one end and "vile & hateful" way at the other. If a song is too close to the latter end, I'm just not going to sing it. If there's something that feels worthwhile about it, but there's a line or two I'm not comfortable singing I have no compunctions about changing a line or stitching in a verse from another version, or dropping one--IF it works poetically. If Wayne Erbsen or anyone else does this clumsily, well, that version isn't likely to stick around. Meanwhile, better that folks are learning the tune and some of a song--when they chance to hear a better variant, many will switch to singing it.

Bill