Clary's thought, which I've passed on to NytCrawler, was that it might be Ed McCurdy. Not for certain, but that was his best guess.

Obie, sorry to correct you, but Catherine didn't do the first recording of the song. She herself didn't sing it until someone brought it up in a Singalong Jubilee rehearsal.

One interesting anecdote captured in a National Film Board vignette on Helen Creighton was that many years after she had collected the song from someone, he had been asked to sing it for a show with Helen Creighton. She asked him why he sang it different now than the way he had sung it for her originally. His reply was "Well, I heard that young lady, Catherine MacKinnon, singing it on the CBC and figured that was the correct version of the song; so I sing it that way now." True story. Ask Clary some time. It's a given, "Folk songs change over time"