I suspect that most of us learned it, directly or indirectly, from Peggy Seeger's 10" Folkways LP "Folksongs of Courting and Complaint." (my copy is obviously the 2nd edition because the accompanying booklet says "copyright 1955, 1962").
Charles Seeger's notes say "A California singer has traced this somewhat nonsense song back to Oklahoma. It is fragmentary and its stanzas, divided into two groups of two stanzas, tell no story. A few of them seem to be borrowed bodily from other songs."