This does not exhaust every source mentioning "Johnny Come Down to Hilo," but it is enough IMO to draw some reasonable conclusions.

I have not found the chanty mentioned in any 19th century publications. Perhaps there are some journals or newspaper out there that do.

I have presented roughly 5 different collected, published chanty versions, from sailors learning possibly from as early as the very late 1850s and ending in the 1880s. There are certainly a few more collections out there, from the early 20th century, that *mention* this, but I suspect very few if any present additional original/independent versions (i.e. not composites or copies). I'd be happy to see more. To that we may add the 2(+?) Carpenter recordings. The St. Vincent Whaler's version is also there much later, pointing to a ring play game in the Caribbean, but it is hard to assess how that can be connect back to 19th century.

In all events, though the chanty seems to have been well established, relatively speaking (if the extant evidence is any indicator) it was not *so* common. The commercial chanty boom in the 1920s would seem to have made it appear disproportionately well-known.

The original chanty versions collected correspond very little in their solo verses. This is what I expect in the case of chanties. The one correspondence is Bullen's verse and Terry's opening verse about "never seen the like." This could have been a "regulation verse" of sorts (though not "de riguer" if it's not in the others!). It's certainly a common floating verse form from minstrel songs, so there's no particular need to explain it. However, seeing that it is the *only* correspondence, and if one want to be hyper-critical, one could ask whether Bullen influenced Terry. It does seem (based surveying his other items) that Bullen influenced Terry a little, and since Terry "fudged" his forms (he thought they were ideals, therefore didn't have to be transparent about his sources), he might have used it as a model. But no big deal if he didn't.

What we can see is that Terry's presentation, based on WJ Dowdy, had the most profound influence. When Colcord repeated it, then Lomax repeated Colcord...and after Terry's book was institutionalized and recorded by at least 4 artists...and then after Hugill came along and opaquely rehashed the presentation with just the right gloss of "folk process" (?)... it is now a sort of "standard."

Other branches have been created nowadays by, say, the Oscar Brand version (deliberately bawdy) and the Mystic Seaport (sanitized) version.

How the chanty may have emerged (if it did) from the African-American folk song is still very unclear to me. Was minstrelsy a mediating factor? What are the minstrel versions -- not contain similar floating verses, but which might contain the core phrases of "johnny come down"/"shake her, wake her"?