That's the problems when it comes to the blues... So much stuff was allready out there before it started being recorded in the 20's, that's it's almost impossible to say wyho wrote what.

A good example can be found on Mudddy Water's "Plantation Recordings" with Alan Lomax askin' Muddy about the origins of songs and Muddy takes credit for something that Lomax had heard had been done by Son House and then Muddy says "Yeah, Mr. Son House taught me that song." And look at "Walkin' Blues" that lots of folks attribute to Robert Johnson, yet other musicans at the time were recording similar songs with some of the same phrases...

We had this very discussion a couple two or three years ago over at Tweedsblues and eventually just had to throw in the towell on it because there just isn't much documentation. There are a few remaining recordings, thanks mostly to the Lomaxes, but lots of these folks didn't write and so other than recordings, which do no prove authorship, we just don't have much to go on...

As fir Blind Willie Johnson being the first to record the song in 1930 one has to keep in mind that Son House was allreaqdy not only a legendary bluesman in 1930 but a heavily copied one at that...

Bobert