"Johnny come down de hollow" is quoted in William Cullen Bryant, CORN-SHUCKING IN SOUTH CAROLINA--FROM THE LETTERS OF A TRAVELLER (BARNWELL DISTRICT, South Carolina, March 29, 1843) (Click here and scroll down), where the words are "De nigger-trader got me." In Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South (1992; Penguin, 1993), this song is in quotations from Bryant's Letter and William Wells Brown, M.D., My Southern Home, or the South and Its People (Boston, A.G. Brown and Co.. 1880) [pp. 224 and 249 respectively].