Hi,

Thanks to everyone who posted relevant bits of information, and to those who posted further questions, which I'll now try to answer.

Dave, my point was that I wanted to know whether we were looking at a severely broken down version of a song, where it would be necessary to add new bits to recreate the old feel.

Woodsie, I know versions differ; in fact above I quote from several versions. If you recall (part of) the lyrics as your grandmother sung them, please, feel free to post them.

leeneia, the rhymes came from different versions; they don't form a verse. (Hence the dashes at the start of each line that were supposed to make each a separate entry, but English punctuation may be different.) If the Mudcat opinion had been that this rhyme ought to have been present everywhere, then the rhymes would have been an indication of possible original wording, to be gathered from various versions to get closer to the original.

Desi, I'm sorry: I don't have an exact version for you. I just noticed a lot of variation in this song, and sort of collected some lyrics together as possible wordings. The Internet search engines are probably your friends in retrieving their origins.

Jack, likewise, if you have a version that we don't have, feel free to add them here.


All the answers together did give me an alternative structure to think about, though:
Four of those are in the third line, and in one version the "Come in" line looks like it may have been such a scheme in the past as well. That would make the scheme more as Leeneia shows it: A,A,B/2,B/2,A. Whether it really was, I don't know, of course: Let's see what other versions say.

Bye
                                                                                                                               Mysha