My father used to sing this song from a 78 rpm record that was certainly not from 1909, and probably after 1931. It was one of the few batches of things not thrown away by my grandmother out of sheer spite so that we would not get them, and I hve carried the record from Asia to Austraila with me. If anybody is interested I will dig it up. Please let me know. My email is SSircar1 at yahoo dot com dot au

As my father sang it, long after his childhood (so he may have scrambled the words), they were:

TO A MANSION IN THE CITY CAME A COUPLE OLD AND GREY,
TO MEET the SON WHO'd LEFT THEM YEARS AGO,
HE HAD PROSPERED,and GROWN WEALTHY,
SINCE the day HE RAN AWAY,
AND NOW HIS LIFE WAS ONE OF POMP AND SHOW.

BUT coldly DID HE GREET THEM,
FOR his FRIENDS WERE BY HIS SIDE,
Who's often heard him talk of home so grand
But the old man sadly looked at him and said in modest pride,
AS HE gently TOOK HIS DEAR WIFE BY THE HAND:

IT DON'T SEEM LONG AGO YOU WERE A SIMPLE COUNTRY LAD,
IN THOSE DAYS YOU NEVER LOOKED WITH SHAME ON MOTHER AND OLD DAD,IN FACT MY SON WE BOTH WERE PROUD OF YOU.

WE aRE JUST PLAIN FOLKS, YOUR MOTHER AND ME,
Just PLAIN FOLKS SON,LIKE the old folks USED TO BE
If our presence seems to grieve you
We will go away and leave you
For we're [??sadly off you see, for???] we are just plain folks.

I have the sheet music somewhere unfindable, too.

My father used to follow me around the house singing this on purpose, just to make me cry... When I sang it in Ootacamund, c. 1976, my hearers, like me previously said, "Well, what happened then? We want to know". I dare say that the "longer version" mentioned above fils in the putative lacunae...

NB. FWIW, in 1965 I read a novel in which the protagonist talks of singing the song along with his record, with great feeling. I cannot remember the novel because I was not of an age to take down references, but in that paragraph or thereabouts there wss a reference to "Bunny Berrigan" or "when my children broke an irreplceable bunny Berrigan record" (here I might have mentally mixed up two texts). I have not enough dexterity to seaerch in google books for the phrase which would lead to the novel, but exist it did...

Sanjay Sircar