I'm surprised, Malcolm, that you aren't aware that this one is/was very well known and quite common with "country" singers during the last half of the 20th Century.

This is probably due to its appearance in numerous songbooks published in the 1920s and 30s during the boom in Community Singing partially fuelled by the newspapers of the time. Most of the main newspapers published at least one volume of Community Songs and "A Cottage Well Thatched With Straw" was in nearly all of them. I have a small collecion of these books and, though they aren't always very helpful with information about songs, they are a good guide to what was popular at the time.

My father knew the song well, and I suspect that Harry Cox would have given a rendition of it had anyone asked him. It's one of those songs which collectors liked to ignore because they knew the songbooks it came from.

:-)