Check out Flying Fish Sailors' other stuff. They have some wild modern-day shanties. (The moving shanty: Haul, U-Haul, Haul. The morning shanty: Cuppa Joe, gimme cuppa Joe.) In concert I have heard them do Loch Ness Monster as it is recorded, then as rap, then as calypso. I tried to put in a clicky but the website is not currently responding; the address is

www.flyingfishsailors.com

They also list a phone # (713) 318-5178.

FLUPANDEMIC
Greg Henkel
As recorded by Flying Fish Sailors on "Loch Ness Monster" (1999)

CHORUS: It was the flu pandemic and it swept the whole world wide.
It caught soldiers and civilians and they died, died, died!
Whether lying in the trenches or lying in their beds,
Twenty million of 'em got it and they're dead, dead, dead!

There was a soldier on the battleground in 1917.
He turned there to his buddy with his face a ghastly green.
He said: "We made it both through Passchendaele, the Somme and Flanders, too,
But now my number's up, my lad, for I've gone and caught the flu." CHORUS

Well, a nurse was in the hospital when Tommy was brought in.
When he sneezed she caught a face full that was flying in the wind.
She wrote a letter home to England to tell them of her plight,
But the letter never got there for the postman too had died. CHORUS

From the meadowlands of Somerset and o'er the bounding main,
To the shores of old Americay they sung the same refrain.
Mother, fathers, uncles and aunts as well as the odd nephew,
Brothers and sisters and bosses and lovers were all got by the flu. CHORUS

Well, a farmer out in China watched his family dropping down,
And a businessman in Cairo hit the street without a sound,
And an eager little Bolshevik in old Sevastapol
Couldn't keep up his grinnin' at Lenin as Comrade Virus took its toll. CHORUS