Although oral processes of preservation and transmission are well documented for al-Āla, the Moroccan Andalusian music tradition, the tradition is also a literary one: for nearly three centuries, written anthologies have existed alongside the performed tradition, serving both social-iconic and, in a more limited way, practical functions. Based upon both fieldwork and extensive study of the manuscript and print anthologies of the nūba Ramal al-Māya, this paper begins with two key premises: First, that the true contents of the tradition are the songs-as-sung; and second, that the manuscript history strongly suggests historical confluence of several oral or quasi-oral textual streams (representing distinct regional sub-traditions) that together have produced the modern print anthologies. From these it follows that textual variants amongst these anthologies may actually preserve evidence of diverse performed versions of these songs. This paper explores numerous text variants amongst the three main modern print anthologies. Six categories are proposed for the variants, examples are put forward for each, and their relative occurrences across all movements in the nūba are analyzed. The paper argues that only one of these categories can definitively be said to derive specifically from written or literary processes, and that although we lack analytical tools for teasing out unambiguously oral elements from redacted text, there is a strong likelihood that specific examples of variants in at least four of the categories reflect distinct “hearings” of the text, and are therefore less likely to be artifacts of purely literary transmission (copyist errors, misprints and so on). They therefore preserve residual impacts of oral processes in the process of literary preservation. The paper concludes by pointing out that 1) the data further underscore the complex relationship that has long existed in this tradition between oral and literary processes, and that oral processes have left a significant impact on the literary dimension of this tradition’s history; and 2) the data also suggest (though not unproblematically) that textual variants in other collections of medieval Arabic poetic texts (such as muwashshaḥāt) may also hold clues to the role of orality and oral performance in their preservation.