Eighteen years later, I can report that nobody has uncovered a text of "Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness" earlier than that supplied by Carl Sandburg in "The American Songbag" (1927). Indeed, nobody's found a later text that doesn't derive from that one.

"Torchlight processions of Republicans," he tells us, "sang this in the summer and fall months of 1860."

There's just the one stanza. Nothing about Jeff Davis, who in 1860 was still a U.S. Senator and hadn't torn down the government. The two Davis stanzas originated with Hermes Nye on his 1954 album "Ballads of the Civil War."

Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Ill., in 1878. Presumably he heard the simple lyrics, to a very popular tune, from members of his parents' generation in Illinois.