"there are probably so many versions of the song around."

Amazing, isn't it? Thirty or so years ago I was in the local library looking through an old book of southern African-American folklore. Pretty standard stuff. The author (whose name I can't remember) travelled through the American south in the very early years of the 20th century collecting lore about black cat bones and red-flannel conjure bags. Then he described hearing a young mother way out in the country singing a song to her baby in what the author thought was probably a survival of an old African dialect. He wrote the chorus out phonetically and dammned if it wasn't our old friend Shule Aroon. I can't imagine where the young woman learned it but it probably wasn't in Africa.