Thanks, Wm.

Hugill's book appeared in 1961, but Lloyd recorded RR with those words on "Thar She Blows!" in 1957.

Does anyone know whether L & H were in contact (via EFSDS, say) in the late '50s? The same question arose here some years back concerning "Blood-Red Roses."

But surely Hugill had heard Lloyd & MacColl's nautical albums? When Hugill performed at Mystic in the '80s, he said he performed material that "sounds genuine to me." Lloyd's words do "sound" genuine - which is enough for everyone but us pedants.

Lloyd's great talent as an editor of trad songs was his perfect sympathy with the material. No sailor of the late 19th century would have objected to Lloyd's lyrics as strange or of questionable origin. Unlike many modern pastiches, they sound perfectly natural in both sentiment and vocabulary.

OTOH, no chanteyman in his right mind, within the captain's hearing, would have called the usual kind of captain a bastard or suggest that his his daughter was sexually "loose." The expected result would have been "fistic criticism" or the like.