It's an American descendant of a Scottish ballad, The Gypsy Laddie (and many other names); Professor Child (English and Scottish Popular Ballads) assigned it his number #200.  If you want to research, you should begin by using the "Digitrad and Forum Search" facility on the main Forum page: start by searching for child #200, which will find you a lot of variants and some parodies.  You will also find many of the names under which versions of the song have gone down the years, and will then be able to search for discusiions about them -there have been a great many here in the past.  See also the FAQ at the top of the threads list for help on using the various search engines on this site.

Malcolm