Here's how I think of it.

Take this "song"/"chant": "Wipe Me Down" (starts about 40 seconds in) Some local guys from Baton Rouge, LA, just up the road from New Orleans.
I dare you not to hear "Wipe me down!" as a phrase wholly comfortable in a work song of the Americas or Africa. Sailors hauling on a brace to sweat the line, perhaps? Wipe me DOWN!

Do you have any idea what they mean by "Wipe me down?" Don't Google-research it. What's going on in this FOLK community gathering of people circled around, rhyming, moving their bodies, and cyclically unified by this catchy (*I* think) hook: "Wipe me down!" Does it have a literal meaning? A figurative one? No meaning, just sounds good and the words vaguely fit an action? Maybe all of these at once? But what does it "mean"?

What if you—you who don't *quite* know what it means—find it catchy, start singing it, start moving to it. You take it over for your social music making. You appreciate how you can fill in your own rhymes, words that are clear to you. But also you keep the "Wipe me down!" which kind of sort of doesn't mean anything but also is weirdly "meaningful" for you in an oblique way?

What if you're a British captain that strolls into this scene? lol. A British captain who seventy years later finds himself in the position of what modern parlance calls a "content creator." Not only do you share that "old favourite," "Wipe Me Down," but also you feel this compulsion to add some Authoritative Voice to your "content." You'll also "explain" what these songs mean. "British sailors swabbed the deck twice a day and we called it 'wiping it down'." lol x 2

I think Solomon Northup is our earliest (or at least one of the earliest) source for "Hog-eye." Northup, the Black man from the North who was kidnapped and enslaved in the early 1840s on a Louisiana plantation for 12 years. Comes out of the experience and shares the tale in 1853. Says that his fellow slaves entertained themselves with song, dance, patting Juba. The fellow slaves were both people with whom he gained intimate familiarity and "others" in that he came from a different background. So, he observes keenly. And he says they sang "Hog-eye."

Wipe me down!

Subsequently, "Hog-eye" gains some notoriety among people outside that Black American enslaved community. Not limited to sailors. References precede in this thread. White folks associate "Hog-eye" with Black corn-shuckings (truly the site of much African American song material prior to Emancipation). My own interpretation is that the word "hog-eye" alone didn't necessarily allude to anything obscene—Lighter makes the point above that it was printed without reservations. Rather, people understood that the song with the hog-eye chorus customarily included obscene verses. Jinny in the the garden and all that.

Wipe me down!

"We'll never know the definite origin" is a truism, but we have good evidence to see "Hog-eye" as a song emerging from Black American (probably rural, definitely enslaved) singers. We also see that the song was known (albeit *as* an African American song) to White Americans who were *not* sailors by trade. And then we know sailors sang it and it's folded under the discursive umbrella of "chanties" (though its form has some notable difference from the majority of songs that got labelled as chanties).

Wipe me down!

By the time Content Creator Whall is writing, the song is, well, stuck in his brain as among that grand category.... The Chanties of Sailors. What did Whall know about slave songs? (The prejudice he shows in his collection [cf notes in 1920 edition] hints that he didn't give a hoot about what Black people sang because he thought it was trashy—which might mean he really neglected that line of observation.) Perhaps he even knew very little about what down-home White Americans sang in their pop music. In other words, "Hog-eye" exist for Whall only within the rubric of sailor chanties.

Wipe me down!

And now Whall's task is to step up to the plate and show his authority, stand out among the pre-1910 lubbers that wrote on the subject, represent the British Omniscience for SIR Walter Runciman. Skenandoah the Indian Chief. Jack Ketch the hangman of Hanging Johnny. The Rape of Lucrece and A-rovin'. Brits fighting the US alongside Santa Anna. The ancient bowline of Louis XIV or Henry VIII or whatever. It's all boats and ancient British history. He's like those overdubbed narrators on every BBC documentary.

Wipe me down!

With our hindsight, we have no more reason to be looking for boats to explain "Hogeye" than we have to explain "Wipe Me Down." But Whall, in his time/place, had every reason.

Redbones, caramels, all of them stop and stare
All of them trying to steal my underwear

Wipe me down!

Are we done making up Jack Tar stories about these dumb/fun rhymes and choruses?