Lazy John gets called at old-time jams and sits on lyrics sites under the word traditional. The tune has the right shape for that. The words do not. Someone wrote them in 1947, registered them, and renewed the registration, which means this one is not free to print.
Where it came from
Johnnie Lee Wills and Henry Boatman registered Lazy John with the United States Copyright Office on July 30, 1947. Johnnie Lee Wills and His Boys recorded it the same year for Decca, with Leon Huff on the vocal. The two men renewed the copyright on July 31, 1974, inside the window the law required.
The song then did what songs do. It went out over the radio, and Kentucky fiddler Clyde Davenport picked it up that way. Davenport told an interviewer he learned it off the air. He carried it for decades, players learned it from him, and somewhere along that road the credit fell off. By the time the song reached the lyrics sites it was filed as traditional.
No older version has turned up. It is not in Cecil Sharp’s 1917 Appalachian collection. It has no Roud number. The Traditional Tune Archive’s earliest source is a Davenport recording from 1990. Every link in the chain sits after 1947.
One song has confused this further. Jean Ritchie recorded a different Lazy John for Folkways in 1968, and that one is a version of the children’s song Soldier, Soldier. The two get merged in song indexes. They are not the same song.
How it works
Jams call it in G, and it moves to A when a singer needs it there. The melody is plain and the chords sit under it without surprises.
One note on rights
A renewed 1947 work runs 95 years in the United States, so Lazy John stays under copyright until the end of 2042. This page prints no lyrics, notation, or tab for that reason.
The wider lesson is worth carrying to other songs. A song being old in feel, or being called traditional by every site that carries it, is not evidence of anything. The copyright record is the evidence. For songs with no such limit, see the songbook, where the public domain tunes carry full lyrics and free sheet music.
Sources
The registration and renewal come from the United States Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1947 Published Music (entry EP16040, Bob Wills Music, July 30, 1947) and Music Renewals, January to June 1974 (entry R582617, July 31, 1974). The 1947 recording is preserved at the Internet Archive Great 78 Project. The transmission through Clyde Davenport is described at the Traditional Tune Archive and in a Mudcat Cafe thread on the Wills recording. The unrelated Jean Ritchie song is at Smithsonian Folkways.