Peggy,
I just did HUGE post on this then got knocked offline. I'll come back later with more information, but the short answer is YES. You can have multiple versions of a song. You can listen to his, decide on which one you like, and let him do his own version. If a major artist or more advanced artist were to record it, you would have to give a definitive version if you were going to copyright it, but that can be done over time. For now you should probably listen to what he has to say.
For now, I can't redo my post as it had a pretty interesting story on it. But we go through this a lot of times. I have a current song with one of my favorite co-writers that we do two VERY DIFFERENT VERSIONS of the same song. I did mine on my CD and he does his on his CD. They are basically the same song but have a lot of different lyrics. That happens sometimes as different people may sing things in certain ways and approach it differently. If a major version were to ever happen, we would have to go through both versions and pick one, but for now, there is no reason for that.
As usual, since most songs don't go very far past initial recordings, demos, etc. and don't really see the light of day, there is no reason to get too upset about anything. Try to find a compromise and see what works as a win win for everyone. Then go write more songs.
If you wanted to do an interesting excericse for you, you could COMPLETELY RE-WRITE it in a brand new song and do away with anything you two had worked on. Harland Howard once said a writer is not worth their salt if they can''t re-write a song five or six times from different perspectives. You might want to start over and see where that takes you.
MAB
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