People who should know better (including the editors of the Ballad Index) take at face value the claim that "Old Joe Clark" "dates from" 1842.

The sole reference given (perhaps taken from Cox's "Folk Songs of the South, 1925) is to Halliwell-Phillips's "The Nursery Rhymes of England "(London, 1842).

But here's the entire nursery rhyme on p.135 (with no suggestion that it was ever sung):

WHEN I was a little boy my mammy kept me in,
But now I am a great boy I’m fit to serve the king;
I can hand a musket, and I can smoke a pipe,
And I can kiss a pretty girl at twelve o'clock at night.

Not exactly "Old Joe Clark," is it?

OK, "When I was a little boy .... But now I am a great boy" is a lot like "When I was a little boy...But now I am a great big boy." All that suggests is that the creator of the corresponding OJC stanza knew this rhyme or something similar. But "OJC" is a whole lot more than those two phrases, and that's not even counting the distinctive tune.

The earliest ref. to OJC I've unearthed is this, from the Asheville [N.C.] Daily Citizen (July 8, 1892), p.1:

“At night, the banjos were brought out, and to the strains of ‘Old Joe Clarke’ and ‘Pretty Little Liza Jane’ and ‘I’m gwine down to town,’ the puncheons resounded to the tread of the ‘dancers dancing in tune.’”

All of the few references to the tune/song before 1910 seem to be from North Carolina papers. No texts or musical transcriptions, unfortunately.