The Northern Neck Shanty Singers are another group of manhaden fishermen that still sing, I don't if they've been recorded though.
The West Indies & the neighboring Island groups that once fished the whale & grouper now fish under power. The day of the work song passed awhile ago, in the prisons & in in the manhaden fisheries they disappeared in the 60's, in the 40's you could still hear some of them on the Georgia Sea Islands. The hayday of the shanty fell somewhere between the 1860's to the 1880's after the Afro American sailor started to fade from the sea & most agree that few real shanties were invented after the the mid 1870's & some say the in the early 60's. Afro American sea songs have been been heard along the Eastern seaboard since the revololution. The Virginia Gazette in 1774 notes a runaway Negro woman as fond of liquor & singing indecent sailor's songs. In 1785 a New England merchant wrote about "the cheerful & pleasant sounds of Negro labor songs while working the tackle & fall". From the 1st impressment & imprisonment of American sailors by the British in 1807, of which of the 4, 2 were men of color, Britain's Dartmoor Prison saw 5000 sailors, 20% were Afro Americans. From the boom of the cotton trade in the 1790's & the opening of the China Trade in 44 & along with the gold rush in 49 Doerflinger points to these as causes for the need for more men & new designs that that gave up cargo space for speed, this was the hayday for Afro American sailors. Black/Indian captain Paul Cuffe writes of the whaling brig, Traveler, with it's all Black crew visiting Port-Au-Prince 8 yrs. after Haitian independence, this, I believe to be the same Traveler, with it's again all Black crew, that during a whaling trip in 1822 according to song met up with (according to the fisheries report) the all Black crew of the of the whaling schooner Industry. The early part of the 1800's was increasingly good for sailors of color, free or not, by the mid 1800's their prospects were receading & by the last 3rd of the 1800's they were becoming relics. Because of the dim prospects of finding meaningful work they stayed at sea far longer than their white counterparts, they became the Old Salts to the 1 or 2 passage making green horns only to disappear from the sea except as stewards & cooks leaving only their stamp on their songs & even that faded. The East Coast that was once monopolized by the Black pilots, steveadores, fisherman & in shore sailors along with the off shore Black sailor that sometimes numbered as high as 25% all were driven back on shore by the 1860's when Jim Crow went to sea. I believe that the Afro American sailor had far more influence on shantydom that ever given credit for, when he disappeared so didn't the songs. Blow the Man Down, popular in the 1840's, Hugill believes to have come from the black song Knock A Man Down which a very close version, Kick Him Along was collected in the Islands in the 1930's. Pre 1840's heard Round the Corner Sally & Sally Brown whose very close cousin Finney Brown appeared in the BWI in the 1960's along with the West Indian versions of Shenandoah, Solid Fas & Cold & Squally Weather. Doerflinger's version of Blood Red Roses called Come Down You Bunch of Roses, Come Down rings of a version collected in the Bahamas (along with Sloop John B) in the 1930's Come Down You Bunch of Roses. Shallow Brown's found as Shallow Ground, versions of Bowline, Good Bye Fare Thee Well & Long Time Ago along with dozens of others were still to be found in the 60's when they were all but a memory elsewhere.
Barry