I don't recall Gibson's arrangement, but I certainly do recall Van Ronk's. And it's surely the one that everyone was going around singing in the early 60's (although I too, had forgotten about the song until Van Ronk died, and I began refreshing my memory in a lot of ways). This is just an opinion, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Van Ronk rarely got an arrangement from anybody! Let me correct that and say that he rarely got an arrangement that he didn't CHANGE from anybody! It sounds right that both would have gotten the song from Carl Sandburg's songbook.

Not to turn this into a Van Ronk discussion (although he is certainly on my mind), but he is/was such an influence on me at the time, that I find that with many of those songs like "Motherless Children," "Sister Kate," or "See That My Grave is Kept Clean," and even "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," his version was so indelible, that I cannot remember if I had heard it before him.