Frank Warner's "From Buffalo to Troy" doesn't appear in "Traditional American Folk Songs."

Significantly, moreover, it's essentially word for word from an untitled song whose text (only) appears in Harold W. Thompson's "Body, Boots & Britches" (1939). Apparently the text was sent to Thompson by Allen Walsh, of Buffalo, N.Y. The biggest difference is that Thompson's cook was a "maid of fifty summers" and "the most of her body was on the floor." (Very awkwardly phrased.)

And it isn't quite the whole song. Thompson mentions that he omits the lines in which "the coal has done its damage."

Perhaps Walsh (or whoever) couldn't remember them.

Presumably Thompson's book was the source of the song for Warner, Hullfish, and others.

Thompson writes, "Johnny Bartley used to sing [it] at the 'Alhambra Varieties' on Commercial Street, in Buffalo, in the eighteen-eighties." And according to the WPA publication "New York: A Guide to the Empire State: "About 1877 'Corkleg' Johnny Bartley sang in Bonney's Theater, Buffalo,

    'Whoa back! Giddap! Forget it I never shall,
    When I drove the team of spavined mules on the Erie Canal.'"