Caroline and I learned the song from a recording of E. C. Ball. He sang "Love come a-trinklin' down." We had trouble understanding the words of the "Seek and ye shall find" refrain, so we wrote to him asking for clarification. It sounded to us as though he was singing:

Seek and ye shall find with a skinny work,
Give a knock and the door shall be open,
And love come a-trinklin' down.

We received a lovely postcard from "E. C. Ball, Gas and Groceries, Rugby, Virginia," in answer. It turned out that what we had heard was exactly what he was singing! We have always assumed it to be a corruption of "ask and it shall be given" phrase, but we find it so appealing that we have continued to sing it through all these years just as we learned it from him. He and his wife were wonderful traditional singers and have a CD on Rounder (I think it's Rounder). GET IT! Dick Greenhaus at Camsco gan provide it as a good price, with a percentage going to Mudcat.

Sandy

p.s.: Joe: You know, I don't think I ever learned a song from the Kingston Trio. At the time of their popularity, I was being terribly snotty about people who were exploiting traditional music by making it sound like pop music. We went to England in 1957 to sit at the feet of Ewan MacColl because he seemed to be able to write NEW songs that sounded like traditional ones, quite the reverse of what was happening in the great commercial folk scare of the late fifties and sixties. I hope I've lost a bit of the snottiness over the decades, but I still lean toward the traditional stuff and the new songs that resemble the old ones, something I call "the continuing tradition."