Butch & Stewie - thanks for the info - this fills in some areas that I was only guessing about. I've got the Yellow Hammers doing it on an anthology - Times Ain't Like They Used to Be: Vol. 4 - and it also only gives the reference that it "was derived from a 19th century printed broadside".

Besides finding the early version in Levy's Sheet Music, I've also found two broadsides (both the same)at the America Singing Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets site, and they are all the Steele/Buckley version.

I'm beginning to think the Yellow Hammers re-wrote it extensively. It's a good song that a friend has been singing for several years, and now I've decided to learn it, and wondered if it could pass for a Civil War era piece. I suspect not, now.