"Mary Anne" is a sailor's song from the collection of Canadian folklorist Dr. Marius Barbeau. He heard it in the town of Tadoussac in the province of Quebec. The singer, Edouard Hovington, who was then ninety, said he had learned it from an Irish sailor some seventy years earlier, which would carry it back at least to 1850. "Mary Anne" is descended from the old English song, "The True Lover's Farewell", which is also the ancestor of "The Turtle Dove" and Burns' "My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose". The nautical references give it a salty flavor quite appropriate to the Tadoussac region which abounds in tiny fishing villages. However it did not originate in Canada, for almost the same words are given in a book of Victorian Street Ballads edited by W. Henderson and published in London in 1937. Dr. Barbeau published the lyrics of "Mary Anne" in The Journal of American Folk-lore, Vol. 31, No. 120, April-June 1918. It was also printed in Lomax's Folk Songs of North America. It was recorded by Peggy Seeger, Marianne Faithful, The Ian Campbell Folk Group, Cyril Tawney, Archie Fisher, Ian and Sylvia and others.