From the draft liner notes to BP#3

"Goodbye Old Ship" was written in 1935 by Rodd Arden and Dominic Pelosi, in the style of an old music-hall 'heart song.' Our (Boarding Party) version was learned from Paris Kearn, a fine singer of sea songs whom we met in 1989. Paris said she heard it from an English friend. Joe Hickerson, at the Library of Congress' Archive of Folk Culture, found a manuscript of the song in an English collection, but it was written in a very different tempo, and we couldn't make it scan, so we kept Paris' version.

Padre