Learning by Ear v. Learning by Book

Is this the best way?

I'm in a contra dance band with my friends Vicki and Chuck. Last night Vicki and I were working up tunes to play for the next dance, and we settled on St. Ann's Reel. Vicki is a supremely talented multi-instrumentalist. A percussion major in college, she's also a mean piano picker. She went to town on piano on St. Ann's Reel, changing up the rhythm, really making it come alive. I, on the other hand, just plodded along, playing this tune the way I learned out of Dan Levenson's book. My playing bored me. I could hear the places where adding some syncopation would have really added to the experience, but I couldn't just syncopate on the fly. So over the next few nights, I'm going to have to play around with the tune, and change it up.

I learned this tune out of a book several years ago. I haven't played it much since then, and so I basically only know it as I learned it. But still, I've played it, it's a tune I can call up without any difficulty. And yet I can only play it basically one way. This raised a question in my mind. Would I be more flexible in my playing if I'd learned it by ear instead of out of that book? I'm not sure either way. I've probably learned more of the tunes I can really play out of books, in part because until fairly recently I didn't have a good enough ear to really learn a tune that way. Now, when I learn tunes by ear, I'm constantly playing around with them until I get them right, and sometimes when I don't get them exactly "right" I end up doing something I like better. On the other hand, I still usually end up playing a tune in pretty much the same way over and over again, unless it's a tune that I either play so much that I really develop a feel for ways to change it up, or it's a tune I'm playing for a dance and I really don't want to play the same thing for five minutes, either in practice or in the dance.

Ultimately, I think learning by ear is more fun and challenges me more, but in the end I don't think it makes a huge difference. Once you learn and play a tune, you pretty much make it your own, no matter how you learned it. Still, I do wonder what kind of lingering impact that initial learning experience has...