Original lyrics

[<1934]
It was 1934, during the depths of the Depression, but the Gant family of dispossessed sharecroppers was rich in music. John A. Lomax and his son Alan made more than 40 primitive recordings of the Gant family, whose vast repertoire ranged from jailhouse ballads and play ditties to cowboy songs and minstrel tunes. In retrospect, the most prominent of those was "When First Unto This Country a Stranger I Came", which Joan Baez sang live

and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman recorded in 1993.
They all learned it from the 1960s group, the New Lost City Ramblers, who heard it from the Gants..