Thanks, Greg.

"Creole Belle" is one of the simpler pieces in the MJH songbook. If the song originally had additional "parts" ~ an intro-verse? a bridge or "middle-eight"? ~ it would be an interesting exercise to come up with a John-Hurt-style arrangement of the whole thing.

We don't know where and how MJH learned the song, so he may never have heard the whole thing, only the part that he passed along to us. Of course, it's also possible that he once knew the whole piece and then consciously edited it down to a shorter form (to "improve" it), but that's not the only possibility.

John Hurt didn't always perform every part of every song. Even among his Vanguard recordings from the 1960s, there are at least two songs that exist in two versions, one including more "parts" than the other: "Candy Man" and "Chicken."

On one of his recorded renditions of "Candy Man," Hurt omits the bridge-type part that goes "You and the candy man be gettin' mighty thick / You must be stuck on the candy man's stick." I've head the opinion that he was reluctant to sing that part out of embarrassment over its bawdiness, but I'm not sure if I buy that ~ every part of that song is kinda naughty, isn't it?

The children's song "Chicken" was recorded once consisting only of the single verse where the word is spelled (C-H-I-C-K-E-N). That's the way I learned it, and ~ since I first learned most of my MJH repertoire from tablature ~ I think that this shorter version may also have been transcribed into tablature. However, the performance of "Chicken" on the album "The Immortal MJH" includes an additional introductory part, set to a different tune, that goes "Chicken, chicken, don't roost too high for me / Chicken, chicken, c'mon down outta that tree." The melody for this opening part is pretty much the same as what I've always known as "Howdja, howdja / Howdja like to bite my a**" (Sorry!)