It seems I have a knack for digging up old threads! I'm recording this song for my next album and have been digging into the history. My recording is based on Pete Seeger's from his album Frontier Ballads with an additional adapted verse. Here's what I have so far:

“Sent My Brown Jug Downtown", also simply called “(Little) Brown Jug" is a play-party first published in 1911 under the title “Bounce Around" by Mrs. L. D. Ames in her article “The Missouri Play-Party" (Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 24). According to Willis Goetzinger of Beaver, Beaver Co, OK in Benjamin Albert Botkin's 1937 book The American Play-Party Song, the game would be played by joining hands in a circle. The circle rotates to the left during the first stanza, switches to the right for the second stanza, and swings with a dance hold for the third stanza.

Many versions of this play-party have been collected across the United States with many variations in the chorus form, ranging from no chorus at all to dance instructions to the “raging canal" refrain used here. The verse melody is similar to other play-parties like “Skip to My Lou". The “raging canal" refrain, according to Prof. Kenneth C. Kaufman of the University of Oklahoma, is “an old college song" (ibid). However, no published sources are given for this claim. Botkin has the refrain categorized both as a part of “Little Brown Jug" (see D.) and as a The Play Party in Idaho" (Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 44, 1931), “Brown Jug" would often be followed by “General Price", “in which the women form the inner ring and the men the outer.

The play party is often linked to the 1869 minstrel song “The Little Brown Jug", written by Joseph Eastburn Winner. However, there is little similarity beyond the title. While sources don't ever list both versions as the same piece, they are often cross-referenced. Botkin does this in The American Play-Party Song, as does Vance Randolph in his article “The Ozark Play-Party" (Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 42, 1929), where he refers to the minstrel song as the “ordinary" version. Randolph continues by saying it may be linked to “Bounce Around",  but gives no throughlines for development so far from its proposed source material.

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I have a couple questions that I've not been able to answer:

The biggest one is the college song that Prof. Kaufman refers to. Is there a published version to point to? If so, is there more to the song than the one refrain?

Is there a more direct link between this song and Eastburn's composition?

Does anyone have access to the lyrics published in Marsh's Selection, or, Singing for the Millions pp.83-88?

Thanks for any help y'all can give! Hope my writeup is interesting :)