Stagger Lee?

Several clues lead me to suspect that your post, Connie was a reply to my question. Um. The song is Honey Hair and it appears to be a Dave Van Ronk original. The questions (to reiterate) were:

A) Where did the line about the fighting dragons come from?

and

2) Where did the tune come from?

tsuwm has correctly identified A). I have yet to get a correct response to 2). It should be noted that I discovered the answer to 2) only because of my highly catholic tastes in music (disliking only opera and Amazon River Indian music, although I have heard isolated examples in both those categories that I can listen to*). The recording on which I heard the original of the tune did have its fifteen minutes.

* I like thousand year old Japanese music but can normally listen to no more than one side of an LP at a sitting.