'Rare' Caribbean shanties of Hugill, etc

Subject: RE: Rare' Carib. shanties of Hugill, etc
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 30 Mar 09 - 10:47 AM

Specifics, as always, are welcome. Thanks, guys.

It is not so much that these chanteys (not just the few I've listed so far, but the larger category) have "never" been performed, but rather that they have been performed so infrequently (or within such a limited area, as Ross suggested) that they are very poorly known to the chantey audience at large. The second part to this is, again, the issues of how the performances were created, i.e. whether they are imagined, as best as possible, from written text. I would guess that most of these recordings that one finds are recreations of the text.

The Bahamian recordings by Lomax present us with a slightly reverse scenario. We have these "authentic" versions, recorded for posterity and there is not so much of an issue of knowing what they are like (although more than one version is always helpful). Moreover, in several cases these recordings have been seized upon by revival singers and have since become both fairly well known and based on an aural source.

Abrahams' book is obviously the best source so far if we are just looking for Caribbean shanties, in conjunction with the more recent performances by the Barrouallie Whalers. But there are plenty of other chanteys that seem to have been popular back in the day, collected by Hugill, Bullen, Terry, Sharp, & Harlow that don't appear in these.

Out of the few listed so far, "Round the Corner, Sally" is definitely the most common, but I'm not sure if Hugill's significantly unique West Indian version is a part of that knowledge.

As a related note, one book that I don't seem to ever see mentioned, but which should accompany Abrahams', is Horace Beck's FOLKLORE AND THE SEA. He prints the following chanteys, having covered (in an albeit much more sketchy way) a similar ground as Abrahams:

Yado
Sam Gone Away
Ring Down Below
Ding Well
Mountains so High (related to Poor Lucy Anna / Louisiana)
Drive Her Captain Drive Her
Stormalong ("Yankee John" version)
Long Time Ago
Blow Boys Blow
Bulldog
Man o' War Sailor
Hilo
Rosabella
Old Moses
Pappy You Done Dead

Those being noted, the focus (for me) is not on "Caribbean" chanteys per se, it just happens that many of these chanteys in this category have been sourced from West Indian singers.

Subject: RE: Rare' Carib. shanties of Hugill, etc
From: greg stephens
Date: 30 Mar 09 - 07:09 AM

The Bahamian "The Captain Go Ashore" was recorded by Frederick McQueen, Andros Bahamas. And also by the Boat Band ("Take Me over the Tide, Harbourtown casette, 1990, to be reissued on CD May 1 2009 hint hint).
This is one of the shanties mentioned by Dana in "Two years before the mast", as being sung on American ships in thne 1850's. Hugill(introduction to "Shanties of the Seven Seas") thought the song was lost, but luckily Fwederick McQueen(and the Boat Band!) knew otherwise.

Subject: RE: Rare' Carib. shanties of Hugill, etc
From: Ross Campbell
Date: 30 Mar 09 - 05:54 AM

I'm pretty sure I've heard both "Shinbone Al" and "Round the Corner Sally" from Theresa Tooley (Shellback Chorus, UK and Mudcat's "treaties"). Heard other people sing them too, so I'm not sure what you're basing the "rarity" rating on - it may be that (at least until recently) this area (NW England) has been very well served with shanty festivals (particularly Lancaster/Glasson and Liverpool, with Hull just across the Pennines) and I've had a chance to hear many excellent shanty choirs and singers, both local and from Europe and USA, so it could just be accident that I have heard these songs and you haven't come across them. Another excellent local resource for shanty and sea-song material (CDs, tapes and books) has been the Chantey Cabin.
Liverpool's Stormalong John used to work with Stan Hugill and continue to keep many of his songs in their repertoire, many of them not so far on CD. Just looked through the listings on the Chantey Cabin website, but can't find the shanties you've mentioned.

Ross

Subject: RE: Rare' Carib. shanties of Hugill, etc
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 30 Mar 09 - 05:49 AM

The American folklorist Roger Abrahams has written something on Caribbean sea shanties. I'm damned if I can remember what it was called or where it was published. But a bit of googling should get results.

Also check Rounder's Deep River of Song. Bahamas 1935: Chanteys and Anthems from Andros and Cat Island. Rounder 11661-1822-2, which has quite a few shanties.

Also, Nonesuch LP H-72013; The Real Bahamas in Music and Song, for a shanty called Sailboat Malarkey by Frederick McQueen.

I suspect that once you start looking, loads of stuff will turn up, both as shanties proper, and as shanties which have been adapted for other purposes. EG Caribbean Voyage: Brown Girl in the Ring. Game and Pass Play Songs Sung by Children and Adults from Trinidad, Tobago, Dominica, St Lucia, Anguilla, Nevis and Carriacou, Rounder CD 1716, has a game song called Coming Down With a Bunch of Roses, which is clearly related to Blood Red Roses.

Subject: 'Rare' Carib. shanties of Hugill, etc
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 30 Mar 09 - 01:28 AM

I'm making this thread as a place to file certain kinds of similar chanteys in order to benefit from discussing them as a group. Let me first explain what I mean by the title of this thread.

There are numerous chanteys in Stan Hugill's SHANTIES FROM THE SEVEN SEAS especially, and also in the collections of some earlier writers, that rarely appear in recent repertoires or recordings. A lot of these seem to be Caribbean or of less-determinate Black American origin. However, I'm not so interested in ascribing this or that origin, or any particular degree or "rarity"; I'm just trying to roughly circumscribe this certain body of songs.

There is a broken link: For whatever reasons (which could be discussed), these chanteys have not survived well in the revival era. This is despite the fact that they are easily available in Hugill's popular text. They could have been preserved or revived in oral tradition through Hugill's performances, but for debatable reasons they were not. So when they are occasionally performed, it is based on the somewhat sketchy notations of Hugill and/or the few other writers, with little or no basis in oral tradition.

Because they are comparatively rarely performed, they are little-known. I wanted to make this thread as a place to discuss these, which share similarities and are discussed well as a group. There is a discussion of them started here, and of course bits in various other threads, though hard to recognize and locate.

So far, I'd consider these to be in this category:

"Mudder Dinah" a.k.a. "Sing Sally, O!" (in 2 distinct forms)
"Shinbone Al" aka "Sister Susan" aka "Gwine to git Home"
"Round the Corner Sally"

The list is much much longer, but I don't have time to generate more names just now.

It would be great to have more additions…I'm particularly interested in compiling info on who is/was performing each this chanteys in recent times, where they learned them from, etc. Hopefully this isn't too confusing!

Gibb