Years ago, I found a text of "Johnny Troy", collected from an Erie Canal family here in upstate New York. It was in an issue of The New York Folklore Quarterly, not all of which is indexed. I've not searched exhaustively, but years of backtracking, by myself and others, haven't turned it up yet. It's there somewhere. By the time I found it, I'd somehow forgotten about Ellen's recording and put it to another tune (name escaping my 86-year-old brain at the moment). I've done it - mainly in programs about the Erie Canal- for years. So...two occurrences in rural NY. Makes me wonder if it might have been in one or more of the songsters that proliferated in the 19th century. Wouldn't have had to be. Fits well in the old tradition here. Would have been easy to pass around orally.