I realize that "Old Woman from Slapsadam (or wherever)" of the "Eggs and Marrowbone, "Old Woman from Yorkshire" type seems not to have been the song being sought here, but I thought I'd offer this quote to Bruce O.

From Western Rivermen, 1763-1861 by Michael Allen, (p. 190):

James Hall, who collected boatmen's songs, published in 1828 a tune he had heard concerning a boatman's infatuation with a lass who was "so neat a maid" that she carried her stockings and shoes in her "lily white hands/for to keep them from the dews." Another popular song, "Woman in Our Town," concerned a promiscuous woman who "loved her husband dear-i-lee/but another man twyste as well."

Could these Ohio River flatboatmen have been singing from The Universal Songster? I suspect the song was well into oral tradition by that 1828 date. There is no tune appended, of course.

Sandy