As folks used to say "I got a whole heap" of Sally songs. Yep.

First off, as to "Little Sally" 's roots-see this excerpt from Alan Lomax, J.G Elder, and Bess Lomax Hawes' "Brown Girl In The Ring, an Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean" [Bew York, Pantheon Book, 1997, p. 140-141}:

"When the popular Trinidadian singer King Radio made a calypso hit of this song [Little Sally Waters] in the 1950s, he was using the most popular of all African American children's song games, playing all over the southern United States and the West Indies. The forces of variation at work in child lore have renamed her "Little Sally Walker" in the United Sttes and "Little Sandy Girl" in Trinidad. But this heroine of black girlhood in the new world has her roots in ancient British lore. Once it was the custom for British brides to step over a saucer of water on the way to their weddings; thus "Little Sally Water" may in its original form be a survival of early European beliefs about water and purification rituals..."

-snip-

I have other references to this early European ritual of stepping over water as a purification or fertility symbol and will look them and post them in this thread later..