Gibb, you should look up that entire article. It's a model of nostalgic schmaltz - the very best kind, if you ask me.

"Whiskey, Johnny" is the only chantey mentioned. And it's entirely possible that the reporter was a little hazy on what a "main sheet" is.

Meanwhile ...

On June 9, 1934, the Wellington [N.Z.] Evening Post printed a letter from 78-year-old John Hutcheson, listing the titles of chanteys he'd learned as an "apprentice in a Western Ocean packet-ship (Liverpool-New York)" in 1871:

"Reuben Ranzo"
"Johnnie Boker"
"Paddy Doyle"
"Blow, my Bully Boys, Blow"
"Tom's Gone to Hilo"
"John France Wah"
"Whisky for my Johnnie!"
"Hurrah, My Boys, We're Homeward Bound!"
"Santa Anna"
"Shenandoah"
"Heave Away, My Johnnie, Heave Away-ay"
"Old Stormalong"
"Oh! You New York Girls, Can't You Dance the Polka?"

Hutcheson also quotes two lines from the forebitter, "The Stately Southerner," though he doesn't identify the song by name:

"When bending low her bosom in snow,
She buried the lee cathead.’”


Besides the "Western Ocean" shanties, Hutcheson mentions that:

“I have heard the Mississippi Screwmen (the very aristocrats of labour) screwing cotton in the hold till they raised the decks to the sound of 'Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that Flies the Single Star!' etc. I've heard the Jamaica niggers sing 'The Saucy Rosabella' or 'Waitin' for de Steamboat,' or 'Jimmy Riley,' etc., as they rolled the big hogsheads of raw sugar or hove at the winch discharging their coastal drogher; I've heard the coolies in Moulmein chanting as they staged rice over the side; but of all the sea songs, for real life and go, give me the good old vulgar, obscene Western Ocean chanty before them all.


Mention of “The Saucy Rosabella” is valuable. Horace P. Beck also found it being sung in the Caribbean in the 1950s. Hutcheson's 1870s date for "Can't You Dance the Polka?" may be uniquely early. I can't identify "Jimmy Riley" unless (as seems likely) it's "Old Billy Riley."]

Further, Hutcheson mentions that “The language of the average sailorman in those days was, as [the American humorist] Bill Nye puts it, ‘painful and frequent and free,’ and was scarcely fit for polite society. Some of the most popular chanties just could not be written - they'd set the paper afire!” Concerning sung complaints about the officers, the food, and the treatment, “It's wonderful what they got away with when expressed allegorically to music.”

Hutcheson seems unaware that any shanties had ever been printed. “Of course, the music could be scored, but that's a job nobody seems to have done yet.”