OK, this does it for me, this link should take you to the old time music newsgroup discussion of the song, via Deja news. There you have stabs at the words by Paul Mitchell, Kerry Blech, and others. If that is the best they can do, I sure am not going to try to better them. They are far better researchers than I am!

This url is a whopper, with lots of & signs, sometimes they fail to work in a link. So I will put it down both with and without a link.

Riley the Furniture Man

http://x5.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=373864782&search=thread&threaded=1&CONTEXT=910929889.1488977962&HIT_CONTEXT=910929857.1489502221&HIT_NUM=17&hitnum=0