It's fun to discver "original" versions of songs or stories, but songs and stories have a life of their own and keep on growing and changing.

I suspect the original of that story was actually about taming a mammoth, or something along those lines. And there's probably a version with a Texas governor instead of a king.

And Gloredhel - I think restraining yourself from strangling the singing headmaster is probably quite enough to be going on with. It might have been Thomas Merton who when someone was talking airily about how wonderful it must be living in a monastery where everone was having kind thought about each other, said that never in the outside world had he felt himself so drawn to violence as he was by a particular monk's voice when he was singing the office.