Ah, interesting, Jerry. I suspect part of that reason has to do with individual singers who have led the charge with certain songs, then maybe backing off. More interesting would be the phenomenon where those songs become played-out. Like I said about "Drunken Sailor" --people in such an "elite" gathering would GROAN if you raise that one (though "Roll the Old Chariot" is basically the same song, and it was raised several times). Probably tons of other reasons.

There's also the sort of "Black 'n' soulful" niche of songs which, for some people at least I'm sure, amount to a sort of code-shift. It's not too hard to trace the individuals who are especially responsible for popularizing these great songs. But most of them (of the ones I'm talking about) are more recent additions (eg.post-Mehaden fishermen phenom)...whereas there is a mine of songs once coded as "Black" in the "old" repertoire that have yet to be revived in such a manner. I dunno really though, just casual observations and guesses.

Incidentally, Dave Iler of the Seaport sang "Shallow Brown" (a fast version) towardsthe end of the Thurs concert. I liked it -- his voice and way of singing it-- a lot.

Thanks, Jerry, for the compliment; it really means a lot to me. I'm really interested in developing a sort of chantey singing that treats the "tradition" as a format or shell (for example, like "the Blues form") rather than the "tradition" as specific texts that just happened to have been collected, written down, and set. Of course, this only applies to a certain portion of the chantey repertoire, and my viewpoint is an eccentric one.

Gibb