Specifics:

Buell Kazee, "Old Whisker Bill, The Moonshiner, Brunswick E 22500, April 19, 1927. Not recorded by anyone else during the 20s except an unissued 1929 Gennett take by Leonard Rutherford and John Foster as "Kentucky Moonshiner." I first heard it when Kazee sang it to me in summer 1955 at his home in Lexington, KY.

Not a common song. It's another of the rare ones collected by Carl Sandburg in his "American Songbag," 1927 as "Kentucky Moonshiner," with the same minor tune (a beauty); he got it from Gilbert R. Combs. (related to folk collector Josiah Combs??)

Slightly later versions: it's in Walter Peterson (The Kentucky Wonder Bean)'s 1931 folio "Mountain Ballads and Old Time Songs," but Walter, a radio singer with harmonica and guitar, never recorded it. Gus Meade thought it related to "Rye Whiskey" as given in the Lomaxes' "American Ballads and Folk Songs," 1934 p 170, but I disagree, it seems clearly a distinct song.

You might think Kentucky-born radio singer Bradley Kincaid would have sung it. But he apparently didn't -- no recording of it, and no variant found in those of his music folios I've been able to trace, nor in Loyal Jones' Kincaid biography. There are other marginally related Moonshiner songs like the one Leonard Roberts printed in "Sang Branch Settlers," but only marginally.

So the very few sources point to Kentucky origin. Can anyone trace it back earlier than Buell Kazee and Sandburg/Combs'/ separate but similar version?

About the Irish version sung by the Clancys, with its peppy major-key tune, its "I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler" chorus related to the song of the same name and to "Wagoner's Lad," and its possible relationship to "The Wild Rover," I'm not qualified to say. It strikes me as a concoction, maybe recent. Maybe Liam Clancy could tell you if it's a real Irish original or not.   

Was the word "moonshiner" in use in Ireland at all for illegal whiskey makers? I wouldn't have thought so, but my Webster's gives "moonshine" as originating 1500, originally for moonlight, then for nonsense, finally for illegally distilled corn whiskey. "Moonshiner" is traced to 1860 with no indication of origin.

That's as much as I've been able to find out. I'm tentatively leaning toward American origin, not Irish, for the song. But I could easily be wrong.

Bob