"Joe Bowers", also known as "Old Joe Bowers" is an American ballad. It is in The John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas. It was collected from W.P. Detherow in Batesville, AR, on June 25th, 1952. Mr. Detherow said
"This is a song of Joe Bowers. Joe Bowers lived in Pike County, Missouri, and he had a brother they called Ike, and he was engaged to a girl by the name of Sally Black. It's a true story and they agreed for him to go to California. That was during the gold rush, a hundred years ago now. And he went out there and the girl went back on him and married another fellow and he made a song about it and sung away his troubles in a kind of a humorous way."
"Jack and Joe" is a variant. Along with "Two Little Lads" it is one of the family
of "the girl I left behind" songs where the girl marries someone else while her lover is away.
It is in the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection.
It is printed in Randolph's Ozark Folksongs (1946), Belden's Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk Lore Society (1940), Brown's Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (1952) and Seeger's American Favorite Ballads (1961).
It was recorded by Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Logan English, Hedy West and others.