The following is from Paul Oliver:

In 1920, W.C. Handy published 'Long Gone' with words by the black song writer Chris Smith, based on a Kentucky folk song, known variously as 'Lost John', 'Long John' or 'Long John Dean'. The sheet music claimed that it was 'Another Casey Jones' or 'Steamboat Bill'. Everyone was singing its seven verses but 'eventually you will sing "Long Gone" with a hundred verses' - an acknowledgment of the reworking of songs in oral tradition. Abbe Niles stated that the song was based 'on an actual event' in which a black trusty in the jail at Bowling Green, Kentucky, was to be the victim of a test on the efficiency of a pack of new bloodhounds. John Dean fixed 'a steep trap in a barrel on its side, over which he jumped as he started; the lead hound followed the scent into the barrel and the trap; the rest stopped to investigate', by which time Long John was well away. The story probably came from Handy who had embroidered a version he had given to Dorothy Scarborough which she retold in a paper to the Texas Folk-Lore Society. In this, Long John was escaping from 'a Joe Turner' (presumably the legendary 'long-chain man' who escorted convicts to prison) and made use of a barrel to decoy the dogs. The incident did not appear in either the song as rewritten by Handy, or in the versions collected or recorded.[Paul Oliver 'Songsters & Saints' Cambridge Uni Press 1999 p68]

The sheet music is reproduced in Scarborough 'On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs' pp 266-268.

The Niles reference is in Abby Niles 'Notes to the Collection' in Handy 'A Treasury of the Blues' p 251

--Stewie.