"Just by the fence lay the big bulldog, with the henhouse side by side."

Song is out of the minstrel/vaudeville tradition and was also recorded by Uncle Dave as "I Don't Care If I Never Wake Up." I would have sworn I got it from him, but with your reminder, I'm pretty sure that I actually learned it off "Merchants Lunch," an LP I've never owned but which got a great deal of airplay on the local C&W station in the 70s. (The long-gone WKKW, Bridgeport, WV, which may have been the first alt.country station.) In those days I could pick up a song from hearing it once or twice. Both ear and memory have deteriorated a lot since then!

Can't share your belief that this is a black group; they sound hillbilly to me -- NC, I would think, from the picking and the accent, or maybe east TN (their only sides were recorded in 10/1929 at Johnson City, when Columbia stopped there to record for a few days, en route to a bigger field session in Atlanta.

Dixon, Godrich & Rye were thoughtful enough to include a list of the field sessions by the record companies in the 1920s and 1930s, with the names of the race artists who recorded at each. Ellis Williams is the only black artist credited by them to the Johnson City session.

Tony Russell's hillbilly discography would be more useful if he had prepared a similar artist list for the field sessions. However, I see by a quick check that the Bentleys recorded immediately after Clarence Ashley's solo session of 4 banjo tunes.