Snuffy, my experience was similar. All of Carpenter's shantymen were elderly, and one of them actually seems to slide into gibberish on occasion. I once examined Carpenter's 1929 Harvard dissertation. I doubt very much that it would earn him his degree today. Because they were collected from a number of actual shantymen, the texts are of considerable scholarly interest, but modern singers won't find much to beguile them. There is little information about the singers beyond their age and where they were recorded. The shanty texts are mostly only four or five stanzas long, the vast majority of which are either very familiar or quite uninspired. None of the few barely audible bawdy verses to be heard (with great difficulty) on Carpenter's recordings are included. Nor is there any music. The quality of the lyrics Carpenter collected (on both sides of the Atlantic) leads me to wonder how many of the most entertaining stanzas in Stan Hugill's books might not have been created by -- No! I can't bring myself to write it!
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