Wow!Reminds me of the mando orchestra I used to play in...love that diminutive!

Ok this is wild. Mark I'm going to PM you to explore further.  

The Leadbelly connection definitely makes it possible that they were acquainted.  My dad certainly knew Leadbelly, and there is another family friend, Ruth Burnett, who had some rather salacious stories to tell about her encounters with him at parties.  I'm afraid she was not a fan (:

Mark that is amazing!

My parents and your parents may well have known each other in the 1940-50s in the NYC creative 'Bohemian' scene... there were often poets, musicians, writers, painters, and other characters over at our apt partying and playing music- both folk music and classical. My parents were more into classical music, but they were very creative and musical. My father was a physicist at Brooklyn P.I.(taught himself to play flute).  My mother (who played harpsichord pretty well) was a self employed photographer... she took photos of Leadbelly in the late 40s in NYC. Oh the stories she had!

Thank you for telling us this, it's fascinating!

My mother was a commercial artist who worked from home.  She and my father both loved world music and my father was very active in the NYC folk revival scene of the late 1940s and 1950s.  My mother used to always have a stack of ethnic 78s on the phonograph, and later 33s (LPs) so I grew up constantly listening to music from Russia (including Ukraine), Spain, France, Israel, and the Caribbean as well as American, English and Irish folk songs, South African music from Josef Marais, Broadway musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan which my father particularly loved. 

Very nicely played, Mark! A rather interesting and pleasing structure to that tune. You learned this as a child? You must have had a childhood with lots of cultural music exposure. Tell us a bit more!