Joyce H. Cauthen (With Fiddle and Well-Rosined Bow: Old-Time Fiddling in Alabama, University of Alabama Press, 1990) says:

"'Buffalo Gals, (Won't You Come Out Tonight?)' is another tune that had folk origins though it was published in 1848 as a minstrel tune. It was already well known in Mobile in 1846, where a woman who had once been 'a flower, innocent and beautiful but long since torn from its stem, trampled, soiled and desecrated' was arrested for drunkenly singing 'Mobile Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?' on the streets." (pp. 13-14; the documentation is "Alabama Planter, 10 December 1846").

~Masato