The Parchman Farm levee song does have a melodic relationship to I've Been Workin' on the Railroad," all right -- though I would think it was recorded late enough in time that it could have been influenced by the commercial version.

Doesn't seem related in words or tune, though, to "The Levee Song" / "Workin' On the Levee". (The treatment of the levee is very different, with no real related phrasing.) I'm guessing that is a different song, not composed as an intro to "I've Been Working on the Railroad," and that before Carmina Princetonia merged the two, they were distinct.

Which means a prior original, but where can it be? For both songs we're stuck with that 1894 publication, which can hardly be an original.

I'd think if "I've Been Working on the Railroad" existed before 1894 the minstrels would have snapped up -- the Princeton boys are unlikely to have written it. (It's really a concoction of two or more songs -- I'm betting the Dinah part was once also separate.) But no sign of it so far as I know. Amazing that a song that's become such a cliche has such a slipshod, mostly uninvestigated history. Even Gus Meade in his Country Music Sources has nothing else on it.

Equally with "Workin' on the Levee." It's a grand tune, very distinctive -- when I read the score in the IOCA Song Fest I immediately recalled hearing it as a child in that local minstrel show. But where those minstrels in Pennsylvania got it is a mystery.    My guess is that they were unlikely to have a traditional version, so maybe they found it in one of those "How to Put On a Minstrel Show for Fun and Profit" manuals.

It's also a mystery where the Bests (or their predecessors in the IOCA) got the song. (Maybe they heard a local minstrel show too?)

"Workin' On the Levee" is good enough and memorable enough so that it ought to have been known and circulated. I'm still searching the web's numerous popular song archives and sources for African-American and minstrel songs, but so far have come up with nothing. Finding it was one of those stunning moments for me: a song that I knew as a child, then forgot, and only now recall again.

Bob