Earliest Commercial Shanty Recordings

Subject: RE: Earliest Commercial Shanty Recordings
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 23 Jan 22 - 03:52 AM

Happy to discover that the YouTube channel by the name of videocurios has posted 3 out of 4 of the 1905 Minster Singers recordings. (Unless the 4th is there but I can't find it!)

The channel also has numerous other original discs of early commercial chanties recordings. Search the channel for "sea shanties."

Here is the first in the Minster Singers set, (mis)labeled as "The Capstan Bar."

So-called "The Capstan Bar" by Minster Singers, 1905

I have confirmed that all of the Minster Singers records are verbatim performances of the scores in the Bradford and Fagge _Old Sea Chanties_ collection (copyright 1904).

From this, it's easy to see that the item labeled on disc as "The Capstan Bar" is actually the item in Bradford and Fagge labeled as "Haul On the Bowlin'"—which itself would be more conventionally labeled as "Haul Away Joe."

Bradford and Fagge's collection contains 8 songs, but the Minster Singers only recorded 7 of them. That means the actual "Capstan Bar" item was omitted from the recordings. My curiosity is piqued since "The Capstan Bar" stands out, in the Bradford collection, as an item of dubious pedigree. Not about to search through everything right now, but if memory serves, I don't remember "The Capstan Bar" turning up elsewhere in the primary source record of chanties and I've suspected Bradford/Fagge had some hand in introducing this not-so-traditional song. No clue why the Minster Singers would not have recorded an even 8 songs (i.e. by including "The Capstan Bar") instead of filling up one whole record with the boring ["Haul Away Joe"]. But it's fun to speculate that maybe someone at the time sniffed out a whiff of phoniness in "The Capstan Bar."

The Peerless Quartet 1914 (above) also owes much to Bradford and Fagge's arrangements, but they are not verbatim.