Trevathan reportedly said he learned the first verse from _plantation_ blacks in roughly January 1895. Trevathan was a wealthy amateur guitarist unable to read music who liked to learn black folk songs and he taught the gist of "The Bully" to pro singer Ferris Hartman in San Francisco before he just as enthusiastically taught it to May Irwin after they rode a train from S.F. to Chicago together and he played it on the train. Hartman and Irwin both adopted it on stage. All the verses except the first were typical "coon song" junk of the time that had been added on, not the folk kernel, junk varying from city to city. E.g. Irwin mentioned that she added stuff herself. In practice the exact order of the various copyrights and publications usually can't prove much about any of that stuff on the ground, and to my understanding doesn't in this case.

The idea that if someone in St. Louis _also_ knew a particular folk number by such-and-such a time, Trevathan must have visited a particular brothel, is connecting dots for no good reason. It's a lot like finding out that two people knew "Duncan And Brady" e.g. and concluding that... one must have learned it from the other. And where.

Sigmund Spaeth, one of the writers involved in the mythology here, certainly wasn't above intellectual dishonesty. Paul Oliver, who certainly was above it, eventually talked about Trevathan "probably" hearing stuff in St. Louis (probably?!), and that has crept over to the outright claim that he did without the probably in some more recent sources. Oliver was awesome at collecting mountains of information _and_ synthesis _and_ writing clearly but he was sometimes not skeptical enough about sources of information (e.g. about John Jacob Niles' tall tale about an early blues stage singer Niles had made up). A recent book says Trevathan was a "St. Louis sports writer," but when I was digging around in vintage newspapers today, he was a sports writer and St. Louis wasn't one of the cities that came up.