Joanna Carver Colcord (1882–1960) was an American social worker, author, and maritime folklorist. She was born aboard the barque Charlotte A. Littlefield while her father, Captain Lincoln Alden Colcord, was sailing in the South Pacific near New Caledonia. She spent her first eighteen years at sea, sailing on voyages between Maine and ports in China and Japan. Her brother Lincoln Ross Colcord was born seventeen months later — reportedly delivered by their father while simultaneously navigating his ship around Cape Horn during a major storm. Lincoln went on to become a journalist and author.

Colcord studied chemistry at the University of Maine and later trained in social work, eventually heading the Charity Organization Division at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York (1929–1945). Alongside this career, she drew on her firsthand knowledge of shipboard life to compile Roll and Go, one of the first comprehensive collections of American sea songs, published in 1924. An expanded edition, Songs of American Sailormen, followed in 1938. She also wrote Sea Language Comes Ashore (1945), documenting how nautical terminology entered everyday English. The Penobscot Marine Museum holds a collection of her photographs, postcards, and other materials from her life at sea.