Don't know if this is a well-known reference or not, but I've been listening to the audiobook rendition of Jack London's 'John Barleycorn (or Alcoholic Memoirs)', and he recounts a drinking bout with a 'harpooner' and 'sailor' on a docked ship in California, and the three of them singing,

Yankee ship come down de ribber,
Pull, my bully boys, pull!

He was 14 at the time, which would have made it in 1890. It is curious that they apparently employed 'Negro dialect' in their singing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvHA0p7yX8s&list=PL9nYIzaF1_qa_PRy3AzRKj8tvZ2qD7 ... at 1:30:25, approximately.