Surprisingly this song seems not to have been very well known in "tradition." There are three texts in Vance Randolph's "Folk Songs of the Ozarks." There's another in Margaret Larkin's "The Singing Cowboy," but she got it from Randolph.

The version in Mellinger E. Henry's "Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians" is called "The Death of a Maiden Fair."

One of Randolph's sources told him the song was already "old" in 1893, but John Lomax's extensive "Cowboy Songs" (1910, 1916) doesn't have it.

Guthrie presumably adapted the words from Larkin and set his own very effective tune.