Oh, it's a chantey all right. Captain John Robinson learned it during the Civil War, "at Nassau, while the crew was loading cotton on the ship Hilja." He remembered it as "a Negro chanty."

Robinson had gone to sea as a cabin boy at the age of fourteen in 1859.

He included "John Cherokee," with the tune, in his first-person collection of chanteys, printed in The Bellman, (Minneapolis, July 28, 1917).

Colcord took the song from Robinson's article. His lyrics are the same.