Thank you for the dialogue here. I have a few observations and fact snippets to add - but no conclusion(s) to offer:

(1) Combs is a common name in the Kentucky mountains, in fact, the main eastward route from Lexington into the high country is the "Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway".   I am told by a Morgan County native that the mountain name Combs evolved from the Scots-Irish name Cummins/Cummings.

(2)   Reading the commentary, my mind briefly rested on the notion that (unlike many of the Kentucky ballads with Anglo & Scots-Irish roots) perhaps the unknown origin could be attributed to an incomer from the famine-era Irish. The song has features that once sound "Kentucky" and another time "Irish" - perhaps it's of hybrid origin.

The famine Irish are not featured much in discussions about the region, but the stone fences that lace the landscape serve as a visual reminder that Paddy had his day here. There's a little boreen connecting the Greenwich and Paris Pikes called Harp-Innis Road. Even today that lane is lined with horsefarm workers' shacks -a modern day bothy culture .

Surely at least one of the native-Irish of that era was inclined to sing a song of his own. (There's narry a one out of the thousand that live here today that don't relish a song when the night gets right for it.)

(3) Just this past year, I have stopped dreading requests for the song when I am out banging away on the guitar and crooning. I have an in-law from the high country whom I know to be - in fact - a moonshiner (more a vocation than a career - he professes to prefer squirrel huntin'). When I first sang it for him, his face lit up into the broadest grin I'd coaxed in years.   I'd love to have him hear Jean's version.