I found the folowing version, which seems to be the one Gem was looking for back in 2000, on a website about a man from Poole, Nebraska, USA who's memorialized in cyberspace by his children. According to the site, the man learned the song "from the Ramseys, a traveling medicine show that came to Kearney (Poole?) when he was just a kid in the 1920s."

Link to the site:
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~stovpipe/Pipeline/GCS_latter_days.html

"Let the Rest of the World Go By" (parody)

To a dance I did go,
Where the gowns were cut low,
Held up only by a strap.
One girl wore a dress,
That was odd I'll confess,
It was made out of a map.

On her back there was Brazil,
Her chest a Bunker Hill,
And just a little below was Mexico.
Her shoulder blades were Japanese,
On her bosom there was Greece.

Her hips were Hindustan,
Her lap was No Man's Land,
I couldn't quite make out her thighs.

For just then I saw my wife,
And to save a lot of strife,
I let the rest of the world go by!

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This, of course, was a parody of the original "Let the Rest of the World Go By" by J. Keirn Brennan & Ernest R. Ball, 1919, which goes:

Is the struggle and strife we find in this life
Really worth while, after all
I've been wishing today I could just run away
Out where the west winds call

With someone like you, a pal good and true,
I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find
A place that's known to God alone,
Just a spot to call our own.
We'll find perfect peace, where joys shall never cease,
Somewhere beneath the kindly sky;
We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere out in the west
And let the rest of the world go by.

Is the future to hold just struggles for gold
While the real world waits outside
Away out on the breast of the wonderful west
Across the Great Divide

With someone like you, a pal good and true,
I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find
A place that's known to God alone,
Just a spot to call our own.
We'll find perfect peace, where joys shall never cease,
Somewhere beneath the kindly sky;
We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere out in the west
And let the rest of the world go by.

(Guitar chords for the refrain are here: http://www.theguitarguy.com/letther2.htm )