| Sea chanteys were developed by sailors as a way to keep themselves
pulling together when hauling in anchor cables, sheets, and other lines
on sailing ships. They are invariably slow and with a strong regular
beat - any fast sea songs and dances were for entertainment, not for work.
-d
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| There were two sorts; I think they were called `long-haul' and `short
haul' shanties - depending on whether the hauling job called for
long-spaced efforts of long duration (Blow the Man Down) or
shorter-spaced efforts of shorter duration (Bring 'em down - quoted
later). The `ch-' spelling was probably encouraged by a supposed
connection with the French `chanter'; any such connection may
well be the product of academic minds rather than working men.
And of course some of them were bawdy. They were sung by healthy
males of limited learning (they couldn't curl up with a good book),
working hard and long at a task whose only recompense was the thought
of what they might do when they got ashore:
... now Call-y-o girls I do admire [Callao, round the Horn]
/Bring 'em down/
They set your rigging all afire
/Bring 'em down/
...
When I get back to Liverpool
/Bring 'em down/
I'll spend me pay like a bloody fool
/Bring 'em down/
etc.
Listen to recordings by The Young Tradition if you want examples of
how bawdy the true, old, working shanties could be. They weren't all
that way, and the less bawdy ones may well have been favoured by
the 19th-century `musicologists' who committed them to print.
b
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| (I seem to have done nothing but disagree with people since starting to
re-read this conference after a long absence [My beard is now as long
and grey as Nick Hill's], but here we go again:)
Contrary to what Bob says about there being two kinds of shanty, there
were many kinds and also only one kind. People collecting and
anthologising shanties tend to put them into categories for different
kinds of work. There were, according to these people, halyard shanties
(long haul or short haul as Bob says), capstan shanties, windlass
shanties, pump shanties, bunt shanties. But the categorisers were
generally folksong collectors, or ships' officers, or enthusiastic
gentlefolk. Writing in his excellent, but poorly written, anthology
Shanties of the Seven Seas, Stan Hugill - who actually worked as a
shantyman in the early years of this century - says that virtually any
shanty would be used for any job if it came into the shantyman's head
as he worked.
There were exceptions -
Paddy Doyle was used as a bunt shanty, which was when the men
standing on the footropes hanging under yardarms would pull the furled
sail up onto the yardarm
Goodbye Fare You Well was used as a capstan shanty at the start of
the voyage home. Ben Bright, an old seaman from Edmonton in London,
describes how, when leaving Santiago on one trip, ship after ship in
the harbour took up the song as the ship going home was pulled to its
anchor
Leave Her Journey was used at the pumps when the voyage home was
finished. Detrimental references within the song to the conditions on
the ship are said to have made the singing of it at any other time
tantamount to mutiny.
The songs were sung at speeds determined by the work - so they'd
probably start out at one speed when the gang was fresh, and slow down
as they got tired. Some were generally sung very quickly - the Billy
Riley group, or the Jamboree group; the excellent shanty Tom's Gone to
Hilo was usually sung so slowly that the ship's officers disapproved of
its use for hauling jobs as they took too long to complete.
As to whether the songs were bawdy or not - that too depended on
circumstances. if the ship was carrying passengers the shanties sung
would not be bawdy. If it was a cargo ship some of them would be. Some
were inevitably bawdy, such as the infamous Hog-eye man, others would
get floating filler verses inserted to make the song fit the job, and
these might well be bawdy, but once again they weren't always so.
In one of her collections Joanna Colcord says that the songs were
earthy and rude, but of a kind that would be considered obscene. That,
I suppose, depends on how you interpret lines such as "A long-tailed
blackman push it up behind." Perhaps Ms Colcord would be surprised by
what the sailors meant.
Hugill's book is the best collection of texts (and music) I know of. It
is poorly written, though. A.L.Lloyd's book Folk song In England
contains an excellent chapter on the shanties, written in his superbly
eloquent style.
The best recordings of shanties I have heard are these;
Haul On The Bowline, Ewan MacColl and A.L.Lloyd
Off to Sea Once More, Ewan MacColl and A.L.Lloyd
Blow Boys Blow, Ewan macColl and A.L.Lloyd
and two collections by a group called The Critics, whose titles I
forget - and yes, Ewan MacColl was in The Critics.
Phillip
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