Mary Ann

'Mary Ann'

'Mary Ann'. Canadian version of a 19th-century British broadside which has been reprinted and recorded frequently. Marius Barbeau heard it in 1920 in Tadoussac, Que, from Edouard Hovington, a former Hudson's Bay trapper, then about 90, who had learned it from an Irish sailor ca 1850. Barbeau included it in the National Museum of Canada publication Come A Singing! (1947). It is one of the large group of songs in which parting lovers vow to be faithful and is related to such older verses as 'The True Lover's Farewell' and 'The Turtle Dove.' The song was recorded by Charles Jordan for Canadian Folk Songs: A Centennial Collection (9-RCA/RCI CS-100-4/5-ACM 39 CD), by the Men of the Deeps (Waterloo WRC-1 1143), and by Ian and Sylvia (Vanguard VSD-5-6). Ruth Watson Henderson arranged the song for mixed voices (Thompson 1975).