A little explanation of how a single song recreation and record process happens.

Stan Hugill, in his "Shanties From the Seven Seas," gives us shanties and forebiters not only in the English language. He also gives us shanties in foreign Languages such as Norwegian, German, and more, but I cannot confirm what other languages he used, because I'm in the stage of analysis first part of the book.


To achieve the result as close as possible to the authentic origin, I do the following steps to record the song:
Every time, when I start to recreation process after then I copy notes and generate a melody to learn and memorize, If the song is in a Language that I'm unsure about pronunciation, I find somebody who is native to the Language of the song. I ask this person to record for me text when he read it, and this is the basis for learning text to the song. But of course, are other issues like the balance of accents, and slowness or speed up of the sentences, also dynamics of the language can be different between singing and talking. So after recording, I sent the record to a person who helped me with the record.

Do I use records of the songs to learn melodies, yes but I do it only in one unique circumstance when I have an original song signing by Stan Hugill himself. In this situation I think is best to get the authentic sound and soul of the particular shanty. In other situations, I use only my intuition, and knowledge about the type of work when a particular shanty was used.

It is another exception worth noting: even if I have the performance of Stan Hugill, sometimes very rarely, I slow down the tempo of the shanty, especially when records are in later yers of Stan Hugill singing, and it is because I think and this is not only mine opinion, in the last performances of Stan Hugill, he takes more as consideration stage circumstances, i.e. speed up songs to better music and art results.

Generally, about tempo, when I do record, in most cases, especially in pump and capstan shanty I get the assumption is that sailors are tired and not very happy, due to circumstances of they hard live, and work. So the tempo can be a bit slower, but I think is really different when sailors sing the first song in pumps, and how it sounds after 2 hours of pumping. I assume after the first one or two shanties in optimistic speed, tempo stabilized on the slower but constant and still dynamic tempo (In the next posts I will try to explain tempo issue in other types of shanties).

And lastly, when I do not have access to Stan Hugill's performance, I follow my intuition and knowledge about the type of shanty and circumstances when was used. The other sources and records of particular shanty I listen to only after the record been made, so I'm sure they do not have an impact on my version. Of course, in many cases they matched with other sources, but not always, I thig the ratio is 50/50 if of course song is found.