It's on John Jacob Niles Sings Folk Songs (Folkways FA 2373)[LP], with this comment:

"I wrote this song, text and tune, in 1908, when I was 16 years of age. It was a love offering to a local girl. She rejected the song and the composer. The idea came from one line, sung over and over again by a ditch-digger employed by my father around the turn of the century."

~Masato