Re origins.
One of the earliest printed versions is given in N I White's 'Negro Folk-Songs, 1928. Friedman's Penguin Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World gives the White version and states....'1912. Southern balladeers immediately clapped the news into broadsides, one of them dated April 13th! The White text probably goes back to just such a tinted broadsheet, vended regularly in Negro districts before WWI for five cents. It has been reported from tradition in places as far apart as Alabama, Michigan and Texas.'

A version was published in the school songbook 'Songs to Sing' book 1 first published in 1963.

Incidentally I am often asked, as a song researcher, to identify fragments of various unidentified Titanic songs, but as already stated there were so many that this is almost impossible.

As for this most popular of all the Titanic songs, like most broadside ballads, even ones as late as this, it is almost impossible to identify the original when they were printed on such cheap unrecorded flimsy paper.