But the romance of tall ships is not something that tends to register with Americans outside of "enthusiast" circles.

The history of Hollywood is replete with the romance of tall ships, not quite on the same scale as The Wild West I admit, but even now you get blockbuster pirate films. In the UK the mythology continues - like in the Winter Gardens at Blackpool where one of the bar rooms is done out so it's like being in a galleon (I even get sea-sick in there - at least I think it's sea-sick). My whole notion of the sea & shanties is underwritten by Hollywood and related Americana (Melville) but then again there are areas of the sea-port town in which I dwell where the stink of fish can be so bad it makes you ill. Sea Shanties regularly get 'sent up' in cartoons (don't they sing them in Peter Pan?) - surely that's a healthy indication of cultural awareness of such matters.

Such a person is not relating to shanties as part of "folk" music -- so the idea of Folk as (healthy) fantasy doesn't necessarily apply.

I'm interested here in the extent to which shanties exist outside of "folk" - out there in the 'real world' as it were, outside of that elite & specialised circle where they are Chanteys rather than Shanties. Earlier on I said Folk is but one pixel in a wider picture - a vestigial aspect of a particular zeitgeist (the second baby-boomer revival & susequent after-shocks) but even so I might question whether shanties were really a part of that zeitgeist or something else entirely. Who, for example, of the millions who've watched Moby Dick will have known (or cared) who was singing the shanties much less how 'authentic' they were? Very few I'm sure. Most of us just accept that as part of the cinematographic experience. Any love of the historic maritime in general is bound to engender an awareness of sea shanties however so "casual" when compared to some of the OCD Chantey people I know. OCDs are fine (I feel the same way about Sun Ra, Miles Davis and Rene Zosso - and Frank Zappa too to a lesser-but-still-unhealthy extent) but - like steamtrains in the UK, where normal families may thrill to the romance of a steam-hawled trip on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway without making it their religion - there are other ways, and the true Folklore of Sea Shanties in 20th Century Popular Culture is maybe worth looking into. Zappa & the Cliff Adams Singers are a part of that in a way your OCD Chantey crew isn't.

What happens to Folk when it makes it into the real world? Well, in my experience people will like it but they won't become folkies. One doesn't have to be a folkie to love folk music; one doesn't have to subscibe to the sort of warped religiosity (is there any other sort?) which we find here on Mudcat. Folk is a fantasy, but most everyone in the world has their music. I think of American music and 'Folk' hardly comes into it (though I take an a special interest in many of the singers & songs Max Hunter collected - check out Mrs Pearl Brewer and Ollie Gilbert) because it's so vast and diverse. Zappa, Moondog, Harry Partch, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, Don Cherry, Miles Davis, Michael Hurley, De La Soul, Kanye West, Eminem - these are but tips of vast icebergs of cultural wonderment - and not just for me.

... is quite independent of the currents of exposure that one might experience in UK/Ireland.

You'd be surprised - and maybe a little disappointed, but you'd find plenty with whom to share your passions I'm sure. You'd find repro Montague Dawsons on many a living room wall though, and even a shop in Liverpool that specialises in maritime gifts & gew-gaws doing a roaring trade, though outside of the occasional Fishermans Friend CD they don't make much of the music.