Thanks, Masato.

Do I understand correctly from your post that "Polly Wolly Doodle" is not credited to any song writer in the song books you mentioned, but is said to be a song sung by college students?

I suppose we'll never know where these anonymous college students got the words for that song...

It's possible that the African Americans who used these verses in multiple dance songs got them from those college students. But I think that it was more likely to be the other way around. Unfortunately, I have no way to prove this.

Thomas W. Talley wrote that many of the songs in his 1922 collection were generations old, but unless someone had transcribed them way back when, who is to tell how old they really were when he included them in his book?