Hello,
None of you will probably ever see this, but the version I grew up hearing was on the "Peter Rabbit" storybook album, on the B-side, which was the story "the Gingerbread Boy". The song was part of this story, sung by a woman, making no mention of wife-beating. The album was made by a group of young actors, I think at a college in Boston, and I got it in 1970.