Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs

Subject: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From:
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 12:48 AM

Hi! I've been requested to teach a class on pre-1600's sea songs and shanties for an event we're running in January. I'd like some input from other people in the know for suggestions as to what songs to cover. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: BigDaddy
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 02:42 AM

See book, "Shanties From The Seven Seas," by Stan Hugill.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 04:15 AM

There's nothing as early as 1800 in Stan Hugill's 'Shanties from the Seven Seas'.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Naemanson
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 06:44 AM

Hugill mentions work songs sung from Elizabethan times in his forward and gives an example from literature but you are right the majority of Hugill and other shanty sources come from the 19th Century. That's because that was the heyday of the shanty. There may have been some work songs in the 18th and 17th Century but not to the same extent.

I think this argues strongly for the shanty coming from the black cultures (See Hugill for his discussion of the origins of the shanty). In those earlier centuries the black man or woman would have been a slave only, not a fellow crew member. By the 19th Century more blacks were joining ships as free men and their work songs would have been seen for what they are. A chance to coordinate the crew on a job and make the work easier.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: MMario
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 09:22 AM

good luck. if you find any, I'm sure everyone here would be very interested in you're sharing. It's my understanding that there is very little non-liturgical music where lyrics and tunes can be documented back to pre-1600

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Jimmy C
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 10:06 AM

The Oxford Book of Sea Songs - Edited by Roy Palmer contains 159 Ballads and shanties - many of them with music. They are lsited chronologically from 1560 - to 1979. This book should be availabe in any good sized library.

The earliest one "John Dory" - was well known in 1562 because a play of that name was registered the same year. There are too many to post on this thread but a few examples are:

Lustily, Lustinl - 1576 Upon Sir Francis Drakes Return - 1580 In Praise of Sea faring men - 1585.

it continues though they years until " The Final Trawl " - 1979 -

Note: Not all are shanties - some are poems, other general songs about sailors and their life style.

Hope this helps.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Naemanson
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 04:53 PM

Duh! I should have looked closer at the title of this thread. You're looking for sea songs. I focused on shanties. Sorry.

I'm not sure of the year but Dibdin wrote a number of them. The Oxford Book Of Sea Songs that Jimmy C cited should be a great jumping off place.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: GUEST,ship'scat
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 06:16 PM

Heise, All

1549, "The Complaynt of Scotland", is the earliest the Boarding Party has come up with - older by a whisker than others. Its on our second album, Fair Winds and a Following Sea, Folk Legacy FSI109. The two pages of liner notes relate all the gory details.

Its in period lowland Scots but is definitly a shanty.

Being a call and response piece, its even singable.

KC

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Anglo
Date: 01 Nov 00 - 08:49 PM

Of nautically related ballads, Golden Vanity, Henry Martin (or Sir Andrew Barton's 3 Sons), and Sir Patrick Spens come to mind. "In 88" is a good one to sing, about the armada, (in the Oxford Book, cited above, which is also the primary reference I'd send you to).

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: GUEST
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 10:16 AM

refresh

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 11:30 AM

What's the timing of Sir Patrick Spens? I should think it would be old enough to qualify.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Amos
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 11:37 AM

The original certainly does. It was very well recrafted in a more modern metier which is beautifully performed by Rick Fielding on (I think) his This One's the Dreamer CD.

A

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Abby Sale
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 12:26 PM

The "George-Alow and the Sweepstake too is "A Dittye of the fight uppon the seas of the 4 of June last [1590 - ajs] in the Straytes of Jubraltare, betwene the George and the Thomas Bonaventure and eight Gailles with three ffregates"
From Oxford Book of Sea Songs, Palmer. This is Child #285,

Interesting song in that it completely dropped out of any recorded knowledge of tradition nor was any tune ever recorded until it suddenly reappeared at the beginning of this century as "High Barbary."

So you'll have to decide if this meets the definition.

As to Dibden & the many Frank Drake songs, I understand that very, very few of them actually went to sea. They were for & by landsmen. Most people define "sea songs" as those actually used at sea and mostly (but not necessarily) created by sailors. Dibden wrote "songs about the sea." Again, you define what you want.

KC, if you chance to read here, hi there. Now I'll never get Heise, All out of my head. Maybe playing the record a feew times will do it...

The Ballad Index gives 1765 (Percy) as earliest printing of "Patrick Spens." I haven't checked Roud.

There should be any number of period Spanish Armada (1588) songs, as well. Some in D'Urffey but if he wrote them, then they're too late, of course.

"A Ioyful New Ballad," (a broadside about the Armada) in A Ballad History of England, Roy Palmer may be period.

Then there's another question - What is the LAST provable chantey written?

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: GUEST,Barrie Roberts
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 12:30 PM

Try Hindley's 'Real Sailor Songs', which contains items going back to a song of the pilgrims sailing to Compostela.

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 01:06 PM

Abby Sale said, in part:

Then there's another question - What is the LAST provable chantey written?

That's a pretty vague question, seems to me. It all depends on the definition of what "the last shanty" means, and what you're willing to count.

If someone on one of these training windjammers wrote one last year, and they actually used it, and we can prove it, are you going to count it?   Or if it has to have been historically used, what does "historically used" mean? And we get to the question, how modern are you going to accept? And that's going to get into circular argument with your question of "the last provable chantey written". Does it have to have passed into oral tradition, or could it just have been used by the original shanteyman and crew?

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Anglogeezer
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 04:53 PM

You could look out for:-
"NAVAL SONGS and BALLADS" by C.H.FRITH.
Publisher, THE NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY.Vol XXXIII.1908.
Reference is made to songs of the late 1500's though nothing seems to have been recorded until the early 1600's.
EG. JOHN DORY mentioned in 1575 but not printed until 1609.
Roy Palmer's book, already mentioned was republished in 2001
as "BOXING THE COMPASS" -(ISBN 0-9540682-0-3) by HERRON PUBLISHING

regards JAKE

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Charley Noble
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 05:39 PM

Barrie-

Did you mean John Ashton's REAL SAILOR SONGS, first published 1891 but reprinted in 1972, or is there another book with the same title?

Do songs from The Tempest qualify?

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Help: Help finding pre-1600's sea songs
From: Abby Sale
Date: 31 Mar 05 - 09:02 PM

Uncle_DaveO, All good questions - heck, I wouldn't know the answers.

My impression is that training windjammers never worked well for chanyteys. Hugill says he just couldn't get it going - maybe the sailors needed to have an ongoing prior tradition. Berger says he had some success. But maybe it was all kinda artificial. I believe I had in mind original sail up to, I believe, about 1912. But I wasn't thinking of those written by Caribbean whalers until just a few years ago. Abrahams isn't clear about this in his work and the whalers whaled decades after him.

I'm sure that "passed into oral tradition" shouldn't count since so many songs and verses were one-off and never even recorded. Odd, since most of what I'd be interested in as Folk would have to have so passed. But certain material (field hollers - improv banjo pieces) are within tradition even if not passed on.

For the rest, you tell me!