Helen Creighton collected the song in the 1930s from a half-dozen singers in the Petpeswick and Chezzetcook districts, some 40 km east of Halifax; they told her it formerly was sung in the schools. She included it in Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia (Toronto 1950). Carrie B. Grover, who learned the song as a child in Nova Scotia, gives it in A Heritage of Song (Norwood, Pa, 1973) as 'Adieu to Nova Scotia,' and Marius Barbeau found a related song, 'On the Banks of the Jeddore,' in Beauce County, Que, and published it in the National Museum of Man's Come A Singing! in 1947.