One thing about Wiki is that it is a good starting point because if they make a statement that doesn't add up, you can always research it furthur.

A lot of folklore about folksongs is not science. There are and always will be conflicting information about any song. "Dixie" comes to mind. This has not yet been fully researched in a conclusive way. You can pretty much say the same for any song that has been sung.

It is my experience that history can be rewritten many different ways. There is no short cut to finding out about a song and relying on printed matter alone is not conclusive, either.

Sam Hinton described a folk song as a photo of a bird in flight when you see it in print.
Copyright dates are not reliable either. Many songs have been appropriated by singers who didn't write them or changed them from another source. (A.P.Carter, John Jacob Niles, Alan Lomax). I think it was John Lomax who had a big dispute over "Home on the Range".

Dan Tucker is an important song I think because of Dan Emmett, a controversial performer (by today's standards) in blackface who premiered the song on the New York stage. I believe that it was introduced by minstrelsy through Emmett and wound up as a dance tune in Appalachia through this manner. Stephen Foster songs such as "Angelina Baker" soon became "Angeline The Baker". Foster wrote many of these minstrelsy songs because that's how he could make a few bucks. He really wanted to be more of a Schubert than a popular "Ethiopian" tunesmith.

So there is no substitute for painstaking research on a song and accepting the first authoratative information is not helpful. The interesting thing about folk music (or songs in general) is that it's the blind man and the elephant. Every contribution may be relevant (which rhymes with elephant) but it is seeing only one side of the picture. That's why it is called the "folk process".

Frank Hamilton