Yep...Woody stole from the best, as he would say.
My favorite thing about this song is that there are no rhymes in the lyrics...none throughout the whole song.
I remember the first time I ever heard this song I was at the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song (I hung out for a couple months there when I dropped out of Juilliard and went traveling for a year and a half). I must have listened back to it a good number of times to verify the lack of rhyming. I remember thinking, "What a bunch of rubes! How do they not know that they should be rhyming that sh*t?!"
My second favorite thing is that that picture for the video was taken when the Carter Family was out hunting Skookum at Mt. St. Helens...which is how "Mother" Maybelle got her nickname. They were hunting bigfoot, she saw one, and, for the first time in her life, she said, "Mother F-er!" Or so she claimed. A.P. Carter (he was named for the Associated Press) said she just stubbed her toe on a rock, though – and that behind closed doors she swore like a sailor.
When asked by Jeff Meldrum, Sara would not be put between them, so she quit the band, changed her name to John Fogerty, and started Creedance Clearwater Revival.
The rest is history.