You know, I think we're dealing with two songs here. Some twenty-five years ago, I started adding the verse about the bedbugs to "Portland County Jail," just for fun, but I'd taken it from another song, namely, the one referred to above with the reference to the New Haven jail. I learned "Portland County Jail" from Russell Nye, fellow wheat harvester in Larned, Kansas, in 1945. No bedbugs. But got the bedbug song from another guy up in Seattle (can't remember his name) a few years later. The verse I squoze into the "Portland County Jail" text went:

I woke up the other night
And there upon the wall,
The bedbugs and the cooties
Were having a game of ball.
The score was one to nothing,
The cooties were ahead,
When a bedbug hit a home run
And knocked me out of bed.

This verse shows up almost verbatim in a song included in Gardner & Chickering's collection, Folksongs of Southern Michigan, as taken down from the singing of a young resident of a juvenile detention facility (if my memory serves me right).

And now a confession. I sing an additional verse in "Portland County Jail," but it ain't authentic. I made it up, based on a woeful experience in Burns, Oregon, many years ago. (But that's another story.) I make it the second verse of the song. 'Tain't much, but you're welcome to use it, if you wish.

They hauled me to the courthouse;
The judge looked down and frowned.
He said, "I don't know where you've been, boy,
But I know where you're bound!"
He said I'd never get no better
Unless'n I changed my ways.
To give me time to make up my mind,
He gave me ninety days.

Those were the days, my friends.

Sandy