This thread is one of the reasons I love Mudcat.

I don't think Kweskin's song is the version that my friend did, but there are clearly many variants and elements to work with here. Think I will allow the "folk process" to continue, and pull together verses and phrases of my own choosing from the many offered.

I wonder why Sally "Waters" was picked up, and persisted in the new world among African-Americans in various forms, but appears not to have persisted in white folk traditions in the new world?

Although we had many songs and singing games as children, they were nearly all jump-rope songs. I never met Sally Walker--not in central West Virginia anyway. West Virginia was settled primarily by people from the British Isles. The very earliest white settlers came up the Potomac watershed from Northeast Virginia, or up the Susquehanna (spelling?)watershed, then to the Monongalia and down the Ohio. A significant number of slightly later settlers, mostly Scots-Irish, moved across North Carolina up into the Appalachians, and into Tennessee, Kentucky and then on to what is now West Virginia. West Virginia had a very minimal slave population, and it was not until the coal industry came into being that many African Americans moved into West Virginia. The state probably still has a lower percentage of people of color than any other state east of the Mississippi. Of course, West Virginia has also probably got the smallest percentage of urban population of any state east of the same. Without neighborhoods of kids playing on the sidewalks, kids rhyming games may not be as likely to persist. There were also many churches, (i.e. primative and old regular Baptist) that thought any form of dancing a frightful sin.

I wonder what combination of the above permitted Sally to travel to Trinidad, but not to West Virginia?

Janie