The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #48959 Message #3200650
Posted By: Gibb Sahib
02-Aug-11 - 10:23 PM
Thread Name: South Australia:What the hell's a 'Rolling King'?
Subject: RE: What the hell's a 'Rolling King'?
Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, 1961.
Hugill's presentation is a mish-mash of things he'd read and jumping to vague conclusions.
He does not say where he learned it from, leaving us to speculate. I can say that he typically *does* tell where he learned a song from, if from a human source. *Sometimes*, I suppose, he doesn't say that because the chanty is just so common (eg Rio Grande) that one would assume everyone sang it. IMO that assumption can't be made about "South Australia." We've seen that it was relatively infrequently noted.
The material that Hugill presents does more to suggest he *may* not have been familiar with the song. He reprints Harlow's very ad-libby text, from which I think he draws the ideas that "This was a shanty which had a rather poor regulation pattern and all shantymen had to improvise to make it see the job through." And he reprints Laurie's (Doerflinger) tune, though he does not comment on how different it is from his own (I assume he never heard the tune, since he didn't read music and likely did not hear the recording).
Hugill did not have access to Hatfield's work at this time, so the only other presentation he had access to was LA Smith's, which he critiques as follows:
"Miss L.A. Smith's rhyming lines are rather too sentimental and 'shore-ified' to ring genuine. She makes too much use of the word 'main', a word sailors never used for 'sea'."
In fact, she only used the word 'main' once, and at least she told her source, a Black sailor at the Sailors' Home. Perhaps she did tweak a few words.
The irony is that Hugill's main presentation of this reads like something he made at the time of publication that was based off of Smith's presentation. The other collected versions of "South Australia" give no indication that the verses were consistent enough (and Hugill even says himself that they weren't!) such that his verses could just happen to be similar. No, he used them as a base and "fixed" them according to what he thought would be more authentic language. A comparison of lyrics will follow in another post.
Hugill's tune (in the book) is of the Smith and Harlow family, but with some differences. Though it's hard to say with Hugill's tunes (often mis-transcribed), these small differences are the best evidence I can find to support (i.e. from the text alone) that Hugill had an independent, orally-learned version.
However, ironically again, that is undermined by the fact that on his live recordings, Hugill is not singing the tune presented in his book. He is singing what I understand to be the revival tune popularized by Lloyd et. al.
In this I conclude that nothing Hugill wrote about the song can be taken as authoritative.