O, to be a musicologist...

http://cornellreading.typepad.com/grapes_of_wrath/2009/07/dust-bowl-songs-and-the-grapes-of-wrath-pt-2.html

 
My mother, she's a tailor 
sews those new blue jeans
My husband he's a gambling man
down in New Orleans 

(Seeger's version of  House of the Rising Sun with lyrics sung by a girl)

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"Some sang like angels. Lomax had particular success with Georgia Turner, a slight, pretty teenage girl who lived with her family in a one-room log cabin outside Middlesboro. As Anthony painstakingly recounts, she performed two songs for Lomax in 1937; the second and more interesting of the pair was a 98-second lament in a sliding blues scale. It was her signature tune, he writes, and it was delivered in a 'sad' voice:

There is a house in New Orleans
they call the Risin' Sun.
It's been the ruin of many poor girl
and me, oh God, for one."

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/17/books/bk-shaer17


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"The two were over 100 miles apart, a considerable distance in the 1930s, yet both sang eerily similar versions of the song. In an age where few could afford record players or radios, how did so many people learn the same music such as the Rising Sun? And in an era before cars were common and highways were still 25 years away, how did songs like this one manage to spread across the country? Several have researched the topic of “floating songs”, which, much like the songs themselves, has murky and hard-to-trace origins."

http://www.americanbluesscene.com/2011/11/a-brief-history-of-house-of-the-rising-sun/


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Other very old versions:

House of The Rising Sun ~ Tom Clarence Ashley & Gwen Foster

The House of the Rising Sun ~ Texas Alexander

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Different song...