Dick, I posted the text exactly as I found it in Jean Ritchie's Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, pp 95-96. I do not make corrections to the texts I post. I wish Jean were still here to explain this word to us.
-Joe-
She clearly did not know what it meant, why go on repeating a mondegreen?, traditional music has to evolve it is not a museum artefact, sing something that makes sense, this reminds me of a nosense verse in wildwood flower that the opriginal carter family sang