That could be a good title for a book: "The Making of the Contemporary Chanty Business." :)

Song "origins" *are* quite interesting, but I always get defeated eventually by the absurdity of the concept of origins. I'm personally more interested in development, or 'trajectory' (or some other fancy name).

It's bracing to consider that the vast majority of chanty forms performed today derive from (or were mediated through) print sources. Published chanty texts don't merely provide evidence about chanty singing practices (and they may not do that at all), rather they have *become* the practices. Certainly it's not always the case. I learned some chanties, back in college, off the Library of Congress recordings, for instance. But it is the case most of the time, and most of what you'd learn orally from a sing-around has its basis in print. (Why I stress making up/improvising new lyrics, at least -- breaks us out of the vicious cycle!)

"Rio Grande" is a tricky example for going through this exercise (chronological presentation/analysis of print references) because it was indeed such a popular chanty and so well known. Oral/aural familiarity with the song co-existed with writing. More people writing (i.e. relative than some other chanties) probably actually knew the song well, and this makes the chronological run-down too simplistic. I shudder to think :) that even some of the really 'authentic' informants of the early 20th century had heard popular/commercially recorded versions, and were being "contaminated" by them.

I'm not sure if this "exercise" really yielded anything. I guess, at least for me, it gives me a sense of which print sources were original or the most 'authentic.' I was hoping it would also reveal what Hugill came up with, but that turns out to be very convoluted business. Because instead of just borrow lyrics, he made them his own by tweaking them. Things that appear to be from earlier print sources ...*maybe*... have been camouflaged with Hugill's personal phrasing. It makes it very hard to say whether what Hugill gives is an independent variation of a common, orally-passed lyric, or whether he pulled it from a book and just changed "you" to "yiz", "get" to "git", "New York" to "Liverpool", "and" to "an'", etc.