Elizabeth Cotten said she wrote the song as a teenager sometime between 1906 and 1912. She had worked as a nanny for the later folk singer Peggy Seeger in the mid 40s, who took the song to England as an adult and made it popular in folk circles there. Chas McDavitt made a first recording in December 1956, but it was only the version together with Nancy Whiskey that came out as a single and became a hit that made it to number 5 in the British charts. The British songwriters Paul James and Fred Williams had previously illegally registered the authorship, but this was later corrected on the initiative of Chas McDavitt.