Gillham placed an ad in the February 27, 1916 issue of the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_ offering to singers a hundred verses of lyrics for "Hesitation Blues" he had thought up. He claimed to researcher George Blau (who talked with both W.C. Handy and him and is still alive) that he was the person who thought up "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, show me a woman a man can trust" and "If the river was whiskey and I was a duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up," and judging from what we _don't_ find in e.g. Howard Odum 1911 or the 1915 article about Floyd Canada or Lasses White's 1912 song, etc., I think he may have been telling the truth.