Alan Arkin was a co-author of the Banana Boat Song...
Arkin could be better described as the arranger of the version that we most commonly hear, courtesy of Harry Belafonte, who used Arkin's version as the basis of his own. It's likely a 19th century call-and-response work song (despite what Wikipedia says) that had been adapted to a variety of other uses well before the era of recorded music.
Responses