Amen...

So, now that we know for certain that we can't know for certain... Back to the fun.

This actually is a bit of a dense question - but do the Library of Congress or Lomax series of recordings have any 'shanty' based collections? I have one that's the 'Anthracite Coal Miners', and I've seen collections of flatboat river songs and the like, but I don't recall seeing one of the truly 'scholarly' series having a shanty disc...

Something like that, while solving nothing, would be a wonderful historic aid for this kind of discussion. One element that is somewhat lacking in all of the above is that while most of us have access to the same 'paper' data, we're all (OK, several of us are) listening to different 'aural' data sources. The singer influences the music in ways well beyond the origin of the song - Paul Clayton, for example, while producing a GREAT recording, makes the shanties all sound about as 'White European' as anything possibly ever could...

It'd be interesting to know if any original recordings from the very tail end of the 'golden age' are around on CD...

M