Jean Ritchie, who carried it out of Viper in Perry County, Kentucky, was careful about where it came from. “Jubilee is a Ritchie family gamesong,” she said, “but I never did a copyright on it because it was collected from another source in the community — everyone around knew it.” She named the collector: a woman called Marian Skein wrote it down at Ary, Kentucky, and Lynn Rohrbough published it through the Cooperative Recreation Service in Delaware, Ohio, in 1939. Ritchie recorded it in 1952 for Singing the Traditional Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family on Elektra, and again with Doc Watson in 1963.

The verses are the loose, swappable stock of a play-party rather than a fixed narrative — the hardest work the singer ever did, peaches in the summertime and apples in the fall, a needle and thread, the old grey mare, coffee growing on a white oak tree — and singers add or drop them at will, which is why versions run to very different lengths. Rory and Alex McEwen with Isla Cameron put it on Folksong Jubilee in 1958, and the Scottish singer Iona Fyfe revived it in 2019. Lindsay Lou opened it out again on Bluegrass Women in 2026, one of ten songs on that record written or carried into the tradition by women.