Perry Friedman sang two verses of Mary Ann in 1960 on his Topic EP Vive La Canadienne. The album notes commented:

    This unusual sailor's song comes from the collection of Dr. Marius Barbeau, the dean of Canadian folklorists. He heard it in 1920 in the town of Tadoussac in the province of Quebec. The singer, Edouard Hovington, who was then ninety, had been for many years an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, the famous fur-trading company which played such an important part in Canada's early history. He said he had learned it from an Irish sailor some seventy years earlier, which would carry it back at least to 1850.

    Mary Ann is obviously 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, but this is one of the most unusual of the many variants. The nautical references give it a salty flavour 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. Even the lobster and the blue fish, which seem typically Canadian, are found in the English version. The only difference is in the final stanza: instead of longing for a flask of gin, the Victorian ballad concludes:

       The pride of all our kitchen rare
       That in our kitchen garden grows
       Was pumpkins, but none could compare
       In angel form to my Mary Ann.