The song is in "Ballads and Songs Collected by the Misouri Folklore Society" by H M Belden (1940) with the notation: "By The Side of a River" Reported by Miss Lowry in 1905 as known by her aunt in Indiana.

An even older version is found in "Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America" by George Pullen Jackson (1937). Jackson includes a single verse with the added note: " Recorded from the singing of Miss Will Allen Dromgoole, Nashville, Tennessee, as she remembered it sung in 1890 by Mr Tate, stage driver from Beersheba to Beersheba Springs on Cumberland Mountain in Tennessee". Jackson also printed a full text from another source that was "recorded by Mr. Fred Haun of Newport, Tennessee, from the singing of his mother..." No specific date is given for the longer text.

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