ZanyMouse - it's not by chance at all. I searched for the song when i found alternate lyrics and bumped the thread myself.

As for authorship and origin - it's hotly debated. People say it's a new song and people say it's a trad American indian song. Others claim it's a translation of an old Irish or Welsh song. I don't choose to believe any undocumented claims. I would guess the basic verse is probably old and that the newer ones are indeed pagan additions but since I can't back it up, I would never stake any claim to that.

I do , however, have a field recording I took of a mostly wordless tune not too dissimilar to the one the gal in the Grateful Dead film sings. The woman singing it to me in 1981 was an 78 year old woman born and raised in Ireland. She told me it was a lament about blood flowing into the sea from a river after a battle and about women going through a field of blood to find the bodies of their dead husbands. She said one line was about the wives meeting a woman with long hair at the river washing blood from her skirt. She tells them their men would not be found alive - could that have been The "Washer At the Ford'? I don't know. She never gave me the written lyrics in Irish or English. I don't know what battle she was referring to or even if the song was Irish. I was still only a teen then and not very good at getting all the details when I stalked elderly people with a tape recorder.

Mind you the tune isn't identical and it has a chorus quite different, but it in playing it today, it really does sound like this river song. She did sing a few words while "Loo-Looing" it for me but all I could make out was 'Down to the sea" Some words were in Irish and those I couldn't discern at all when listening to it today. I'll have to go back over my other notebooks and see if I wrote any more down about this. It irks me that these days when i come across something like this and find that i did a sucky job at documenting it.