Shanties were a heterogeneous group of songs, with diverse origins. Some came to sea from shore, and we can trace individual shanties back to African American work songs and spirituals, theater songs of vaudeville and the music-hall, and even much older British songs and ballads.
Shanties From The Seven Seas Pdf Download
IT may reasonably be asked by what authority a mere landsman publishesa book on a nautical subject. I may, therefore, plead in extenuationthat I have all my life been closely connected with seafaring matters,especially during childhood and youth, and have literally 'grown upwith' shanties. My maternal ancestors followed the sea as far back asthe family history can be traced, and sailor uncles and grand-uncleshave sung shanties to me from my childhood upwards. During boyhood Iwas constantly about amongst ships, and had learnt at first hand allthe popular shanties before any collection of them appeared in print.I have in later years collected them from all manner of sailors,chiefly at Northumbrian sources. I have collated these later versionswith those which I learnt at first hand as a boy from sailorrelatives, and also aboard ship. And lastly, I lived for some years inthe West Indies, one of the few remaining spots where shanties maystill be heard, where my chief recreation was cruising round theislands in my little ketch. In addition to hearing them in West Indianseaports, aboard Yankee sailing ships and sugar droghers, I also heardthem sung constantly on shore in Antigua under rather curiousconditions. West Indian negro shanties are movable wooden huts, andwhen a family wishes to change its venue it does so in the followingmanner: The shanty is levered up on to a low platform on wheels, towhich two very long ropes are attached. The ropes are manned by asmany hands as their length will admit. A 'shantyman' mounts the roofof the hut and sits astride it. He sings a song which has a chorus,and is an exact musical parallel of a seaman's 'pull-and-haul' shanty.The crowd below sings the chorus, giving a pull on the rope at therequired points in the music, just as sailors did when hauling at sea.Each pull on the rope draws the hut a short distance forward, and theprocess is continued till its final resting-place is reached, when theshantyman descends from the roof. The hut is then levered off theplatform on to terra firma and fixed in its required position.
Before the days of factories and machinery, all forms of work wereliterally manual labour, and all the world over the labourer,obeying a primitive instinct, sang at his toil: the harvester with hissickle, the weaver at the loom, the spinner at the wheel. Long aftermachinery had driven the labour-song from the land it survived at seain the form of shanties, since all work aboard a sailing vessel wasperformed by hand.
The advent of screw steamers sounded the death-knell of the shanty.Aboard the steamer there were practically no sails to be manipulated;the donkey-engine and steam winch supplanted the hand-worked windlassand capstan. By the end of the seventies steam had driven the sailingship from the seas. A number of sailing vessels lingered on throughthe eighties, but they retained little of the corporate pride andsplendour that was once theirs. The old spirit was gone never toreturn.
Bullen and Arnold's book ought to have been a valuable contribution toshanty literature, as Bullen certainly knew his shanties, and used tosing them capitally. Unfortunately his musical collaborator does notappear to have been gifted with the faculty of taking down authenticversions from his singing. He seems to have had difficulty indifferentiating between long measured notes and unmeasured pauses;between the respective meanings of three-four and six-eight time;between modal and modern tunes; and between the cases where irregularbarring was or was not required. Apart from the amateur nature of theharmonies, the book exhibits such strange unacquaintance with therudiments of musical notation as the following (p. 25):
1920. The Motherland Song Book (Vols. III and IV, editedby R. Vaughan Williams) contains seven shanties. It isworthy of note that Dr. Vaughan Williams, Mr. Clive Carey,and Mrs. Clifford Beckett all spell the word 'shanty' assailors pronounced it.
The sailor travelled in many lands, and in his shanties there aredistinct traces of the nationalities of the countries he visited.Without doubt a number of them came from American negro sources. Thesongs heard on Venetian gondolas must have had their effect, as manyexamples show. There are also distinct traces of folk-songs which thesailor would have learnt ashore in his native fishing village, and themore familiar Christy Minstrel song was frequently pressed into theservice. As an old sailor once said to me: 'You can make anything intoa shanty.'
Of the usual troubles incidental to folk-song collecting it isunnecessary to speak. But the collection of shanties involvesdifficulties of a special kind. In taking down a folk-song from arustic, one's chief difficulty is surmounted when one has broken downhis shyness and induced him to sing. There is nothing for him to dothen but get on with the song. Shanties, however, being labour songs,one is 'up against' the strong psychological connection between thesong and its manual acts. Two illustrations will explain what I mean.
An incident related to me quite casually by Sir Walter Runciman throwsa similar light on the inseparability of a shanty and its labour. Hedescribed how one evening several north country ships happened to belying in a certain port. All the officers and crews were ashore,leaving only the apprentices aboard, some of whom, as he remarked,were 'very keen on shanties,' and their suggestion of passing away thetime by singing some was received with enthusiasm. The whole party ofabout thirty apprentices at once collected themselves aboard onevessel, sheeted home the main topsail, and commenced to haul it up tothe tune of 'Boney was a warrior,' changing to'Haul the Bowlin'' for'sweating-up.' In the enthusiasm of their singing, and the absence ofany officer to call ''Vast hauling,' they continued operations untilthey broke the topsail yard in two, when the sight of the wreckage andthe fear of consequences brought the singing to an abrupt conclusion.In my then ignorance I naturally asked: 'Why couldn't you have sungshanties without hoisting the topsail?' and the reply was: 'How couldwe sing a shanty without having our hands on the rope?' Here we havethe whole psychology of the labour-song: the old woman could not keenwithout the 'body,' and the young apprentices could not sing shantiesapart from the work to which they belonged. The only trulysatisfactory results which I ever get nowadays from an old sailor arewhen he has been stimulated by conversation to become reminiscent, andcroons his shanties almost subconsciously. Whenever I find a sailorwilling to declaim shanties in the style of a song I begin to be alittle suspicious of his seamanship. In one of the journals of theFolk-Song Society there is an account of a sailor who formed a littleparty of seafaring men to give public performances of shanties on theconcert platform. No doubt this was an interesting experience for thelisteners, but that a self-conscious performance such as this couldrepresent the old shanty singing I find it difficult to believe. Ofcourse I have had sailors sing shanties to me in a fine declamatorymanner, but I usually found one of three things to be the case: theman was a 'sea lawyer,' or had not done much deep-sea sailing; or hisseamanship only dated from the decline of the sailing vessel.
It is doubtless interesting to the folk-songer to see in printshanties taken down from an individual sailor with his individualmelodic twirls and twiddles. But since no two sailors ever sing thesame shanty quite in the same manner, there must necessarily be somemeans of getting at the tune, unhampered by these individualidiosyncrasies, which are quite a different thing from what folk-songstudents recognize as 'variants.' The power to discriminate can onlybe acquired by familiarity with the shanty as it was in its palmydays. The collector who comes upon the scene at this late time of daymust necessarily be at a disadvantage. The ordinary methods which hewould apply to[Pg x] a folk-song break down in the case of a labour-song.Manual actions were the soul of the shanty; eliminate these and youhave only the skeleton of what was once a living thing. It is quitepossible, I know, to push this line of argument too far, but every onewho knows anything about seamanship must feel that a shanty nowadayscannot be other than a pale reflection of what it once was.
And this brings me to the last difficulty which confronts thecollector with no previous knowledge of shanties. As a mere matter ofdates, any sailors now remaining from sailing ship days mustnecessarily be very old men. I have found that their octogenarianmemories are not always to be trusted. On one occasion an old man sangquite glibly a tune which was in reality a pasticcio of threeseparate shanties all known to me. I have seen similar results inprint, since the collector arrived too late upon the scene to be ableto detect the tricks which an old man's memory played him.
I have already noted the shanties which were derived from popularsongs, also the type which contained a definite narrative. Exceptwhere a popular song was adapted, the form was usually rhymed or moreoften unrhymed couplets. The topics were many and varied, but thechief ones were: (1) popular heroes such as Napoleon, and 'SantyAnna.' That the British sailor of the eighteenth century should hateevery Frenchman and yet make a hero of Bonaparte is one of themysteries which has never been explained. Another mystery is thefascination which Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1795-1876) exercisedover the sailor. He was one of the many Mexican 'Presidents' and wasdefeated[Pg xi] by the American General Taylor in 1847. That did not preventthe British sailor presenting him in the light of an invariable victoruntil he was led out to be shot (he really died a natural death) bypersons unknown. (2) The sailor had mythical heroes too, e.g. 'Ranzo,'already mentioned, and 'Stormy,' who was the theme of many shanties.No sailor could ever give the least explanation of them, and so theyremain the last echoes of long forgotten sagas. (3) High-sounding,poetic, or mysterious words, such as 'Lowlands,' 'Shenandoah,''Rolling river,' 'Hilo,' 'Mobile Bay,' 'Rio Grande,' had a greatfascination, as their constant recurrence in many shanties shows. (4)The sailor also sang much of famous ships, such as 'The Flying Cloud,''The Henry Clay,' or 'The Victory,' and famous lines, such as 'TheBlack Ball.' Even famous shipowners were celebrated in song, aswitness 'Mr. John Tapscott,' in 'We're all bound to go.' (5) Loveaffairs, in which 'Lizer Lee' and other damsels constantly figured,were an endless topic. (6) But chiefly did Jack sing of affairsconnected with his ship. He never sang of 'the rolling main,' 'thefoaming billows,' 'the storm clouds,' etc. These are thestock-in-trade of the landsman; they were too real for the sailor tosing about. He had the instinct of the primitive man which forbidsmention of natural forces of evil omen. But intimate or humorousmatters such as the failings of his officers, the quality of the food,the rate of pay, or other grievances were treated with vigour andemphasis. Like the Britisher of to-day, he would put up with anyhardship so long as he were permitted to grouse about it. Theshantyman gave humorous expression to this grousing, which deprived itof the element of sulks. Steam let off in this way was a wholesomepreventive of mutiny. 2ff7e9595c
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