Wow, Ian! Who let the horse out of the barn?

Just a few immediate thoughts. There are a lot of reasons why people change lyrics to songs. In another thread, I said that song writers write their own songs because they're too lazy to take the time to learn someone else's song. Someone thought that was a memorable line. (I suspect they weren't a songwriter. Here's another perspective. Sometimes folk singers change the words to a songwriter's baby-child because THEY'RE too lazy to learn the words. How much are we discussing "creativity" and how much laziness? Some of each, you can be sure.

I've been in the enviable opinion of having several of my songs recorded by other musicians. I'm appreciative that they usually learned the words and respected the song as it was written. Once they've gotten inside the song, then I don't mind if they change a phrase here and there, as long as it makes sense within the song, doesn't change the meaning, and flows within the rhythm of the song. So far, every recording of performance that I've heard of my songs has been "improved" in some way. The improvement isn't necessarily changing the words or the melody, although that has happened. It's that the person has made the song "theirs" and it has a new, fresh perspective which I find very flattering... that someone took something I wrote and embraced it as their own. If you're just doing imitations of the original, it's a little like chewing someone else's food. And me a songwriter, yet.

Ed Trickett, Dave Para and Cathy Barton do several of my songs, and I liked the chord change they made in one of the songs, Cabbage Patch Waltz, that I decided that I should do it that way. Ed, Gordon Bok and Annie Muir recorded Living on the River, and brought the song home by intertwining and overlapping the lines on the last time around on the chorus. Really delightful. Sally Rogers wrote another verse to one of my songs, thinking it was traditional.

To continue the analogy of your songs being your children,when you send your kids out on their own, you hope that people will respect them, try to understand them and that whatever change they might bring about, that it be done because they care about them. If other singers do that with my songs, I can only thank them.

Hey, but if the songwriters these days aren't writing folk songs (and I agree with that,) then where is the logic in applying the folk process to them. Anyone want to apply the folk process to Irving Berlin or George Gershwin? What's the philosophy here? They ain't folk songs now, but they damn well will be when we get through with them!! :-)

Just funnin'

Great thread!

Jerry