Back to 'The House Carpenter' . . . Alisoun Gardner-Medwin has argued for a Scottish origin for variants found in Appalachia:

"I am inclined to think that the Scottish element in the ancestry of 'The House Carpenter' is rather stronger than the English, and that the ballad must have migrated in several versions which have interrelated themselves in America between 1775 and the present day . . . . 'The House Carpenter' came to the Southern Appalachian region from Scotland in the middle of the eighteenth century."

Alisoun Gardner-Medwin. "The Ancestry of "The House-Carpenter": A Study of the Family History of the American Forms of Child 243." Journal of American Folklore Vol. 84, No. 334 (Oct. - Dec., 1971), pp. 427