An example of Lloyd's process -- and an error in that process -- that some might find interesting. A few folks were chatting about this in a non-Mudcat space last year (RTim and the missus helped!).

So here's the example. I ran across a recorded performance led by Martyn Wyndham-Read of "Hoorah for the Black Ball Line."
https://youtu.be/T9Z6G8vt_WU
I think, Hmm--what is this melody? Not only is it different from any of the "Black Ball Line" melodies I have heard/sung/seen, but also it sounds just plain weird for any chanty to have a melody like this. What's up with the tonality?

To make the pitches sound starker, I played it on a keyboard, here:
https://youtu.be/sJeOolaUAME

The question was, where did Wyndham-Read get this odd melody from?

Here's my theory. But first, some context.

I've observed on other occasions what looks to be evidence that Bert Lloyd had trouble with reading music notation. This is a moot issue for most chanty singers, who learn songs aurally—directly from other singers' live performances or recordings. But it's relevant to Lloyd because he was at the early stage of chanty revival singing and he was taking songs that were then unknown or very little-known and trying to present them, as it were, for the first (revival) time.

Despite some Lloyd aficionados citing Lloyd's experience on some kind of latter-day whaling vessel, there isn't much evidence that he learned many chanties from a "purely" oral tradition connected with pre-revival working sailors.

So, Lloyd turned, not unlike many folk revivalists, to published chanty collections. It seems clear that for Lloyd's 1950s recordings he made good use of Colcord's and Doerflinger's volumes. By the time of this Wyndham-Read recording in which Lloyd was involved, 1974, he had made use of Hugill (1961), too.

On to the example at hand.

Lloyd, clearly, to my mind, used Hugill's book as the source for "Black Ball Line." One can see the lyrical correspondences in Hugill's text, images #2 and #3 here:
https://imgur.com/a/DfhuCSq

Now here's where it gets funny and interesting. The melody sung by Wyndham-Read, arranged by Lloyd, follows the exact *contour* of Hugill's notated melody. That is, if you write Wyndham-Read's sung melody on a music staff and you compare it to Hugill's, all the little black dots fall in the same lines and spaces.
So, again, why does it sound different from Hugill's melody, which I am singing from the book notation here?:
https://youtu.be/C2OuVe4sPm8

The answer is that Lloyd must have read the musical score without correctly interpreting the accidentals (sharps) in the key signature. Here's Hugill's melody, again, written out by me. I've marked above all of the notes where Lloyd incorrectly followed the key signature and lowered a pitch by a half-step. (See image #1)
https://imgur.com/a/DfhuCSq

All that remains is to transpose this melody up to the key a half-step higher to Wyndham-Read's singing pitch.

All this means that Lloyd not only invented his own stuff -- which might be considered in the spirit of folk musicking -- but also simply mediated material incorrectly. The product is not the result of a "folk process" of being part of a musical community then unconsciously (or consciously) effecting small changes to material through taste or imperfect memory. It's breaking from the folk process, using media, and making a mistake. What irks me about this is not that Lloyd would use a media source nor that he made a mistake but that Lloyd did not hear this was so wrong, so uncharacteristic of the genre.