I believe the penultimate verse was added by Paul Clayton after he collected the song from Maybird McAllister in Brown's Cove, Virginia. Caroline and I don't sing the final verse printed here, as we think it's clearly the work of a modern singer/songwriter and fails to match the language of the original. We might be wrong, but that's our sense of it. Can anyone tell me exactly where and when that verse first appeared?
    Also: Maybird actually sang something like "I'd 'vallee' all of the women that ever I did see," but we found that hard to interepret. "Envy" seemed a reasonable sunstitute, and one our audiences could understand. Harry Tuft still sings "vallee," on his Folk-Legacy CD which draws its title from the song.
    An interesting sidelight: Mary Celestia Parler, in Fayettville, Arkansas, (wife of the great Ozark folklorist, Vance Randolph, and an important folklorist in her own right) once asked me if I had ever heard a song that went... and then gave me a portion of this song. I almost hated to tell her that I had, as she was convinced that she had found a unique addition to the American songbag. I sang Maybird's version for her and she said it was very, very close to the one she had collected in the Ozarks. These two versions are the only traditional versions I know of, although a number of revival singers have picked it up now.
    Sandy