Masato Sakurai called our attention to the version of "The Flying Cloud" collected by Sidney Robert-son Cowell from Warde Ford in 1938, as part of a WPA project, now in the Library of Congress. The collection is on the internet, courtesy of Library of Congress, in the form of: 1) a sound file of one stanza by Warde Ford, the first half sung and the second whistled; 2) the original field notes in which Cowell took down the words of the song from the singer, including corrections and the singer's comments during the singing; and 3) a transcript of the field notes.

The notes in this raw form bring us close to the original performance and give us a sense of the singer; a source from 1938 thus satisfies to an extent the interests in the singer and the actual performance context that had not come to the fore in that period but are now quite dominant. This is certainly a good thing, but on the one hand the transcript is not as complete as it could be and on the other something a little more refined is going to be wanted sooner or later. While the notes are rather as we should expect of a compiler trying to write down what is being sung, and not at all a fair copy, they are more legible than one would gather from the transcript. One gets the impression that someone not acquainted with the song or with anything similar made a single pass over the manuscript, and was unable to return to tease out answers to difficulties encountered at that first and last session. However that may be, most of the omitted words can be deciphered with confidence, and in a very small number of cases the reading in the transcript can be corrected.

I have prepared the following, which may represent a step toward a draft for publication (I do not pretend to have produced in a short time a final draft ready to be sent to the printer!). I wanted to preserve the two comments made by the singer during the course of his performance, but not to clutter the text with them as is done in the transcript; so I have made a short apparatus that will be immediately intelligible to anyone at all familiar with historical textual studies and easily figured out by anyone else. This displays the singer's comments with minimal discussion of their context; a correction apparently made by the singer (the original word is stricken through and the correction written above it), a couple of what may be either corrections or simply acceptible variant words known to the singer (like the foregoing, but without the strikethrough of the original word); and a few corrections of the transcript.

The Flying Cloud.

1 My name is Edward Anderson, as you shall understand;
I was born in the city of Waterford, in Erin's lovely land,
And being young and innocent, and beauty on me smiled,
My parents doted on me, for I was their only child.

2 So with my parents [I] grew up in Waterford's own(?) town;
They bound me to a cooper by the name of William Brown.
I served him long and faithfully for eighteen months or more;
Then I went on board of the Ocean Queen, bound for New Britain's shore.

3. 'Twas in the City of Trimore I fell in with Captain Moore,
The owner of the Flying Cloud, fresh from a distant shore;
So kindly he invited me on a slaving voyage to go
To the burning shores of Africa, where the sugar cane doth grow.

4. The Flying Cloud is as fine a ship as ever sailed the main,
With her sails as white as the driven snow, on them no spot nor stain—
I have often seen that gallant bark when the wind blew off her steel,
With her royal skysails set aloft, going eighteen by the reel.

5. About a fortnight after that, we set out from Afric's shore
With eighteen hundred of those poor souls to be slaves for evermore.
We lined then up along our decks and stored them down below,
Till eighteen inches to a man was all we could allow.

6. Then with our cargo we set sail upon a Monday morn;
It had been better for those poor souls if they had ne'er been born.
For a plague of fever came on board and swept them half away;
We lined their bodies on our deck, and threw them in the sea.

7. 'Twas but a few weeks after that, we reach the Cuban shore,
And sold them to the planters there, to be slaves for evermore,
The rice and coffee there to hoe beneath a burning sun,
To lead a sad and mournful life, until their career was run.

8. And when our money was all spent we went to sea again;
Then Captain Moore, he came on deck, and said to us his men:
"There's gold and silver to be had, if you with me agree,
We will hoist aloft a pirate flag, and scour the raging sea"

9. We all agreed excepting five, and those return to land.
Two of these were English boys, and two from New Found Land.
The other was an Irish lad, his home was in Trimore;
How oft I have wished I had joined those boys, and stayed with them on shore.

10. We robbed and plundered many a ship down on the Spanish Main,
Caused many a man's poor wife's heart to break, when he came not again.
We caused them all to walk the plank, their prayers of no avail,
For the saying of our captain was: "A dead man tells no tales".

11. And we were chased by men of war, liners and frigates too,
But all in vain astern of us their burning shells they threw,
And all in vain astern of us their cannons roared full loud;
'Twas all in vain down on the main to chase the Flying Cloud.

12. Till at length a British man of war, the Dungeon, hove in view,
And fired a shot across our bow, a signal to heave to,
To her we gave no answer as we steered before the wind,
Til a chance shot cut our mizzenmast; then we were left behind.

13. "Prepare for action" was the cry, as we lined along her side,
And soon across our quarterdeck there flowed a crimson tide.
We fought till Captain Moore was slain, and eighteen of his men,
When a bursting shell set our ship on fire; we were forced to surrender then.

14 To Newgate prison we were sent, bound down in iron chains,
For the plundering of many a ship down on the Spanish Main.
'Twas drinking and bad company that made a wretch of me;
Come all young people, a warning take, and beware of piracy.

15 Farewell to dear old Ireland and the maid that I adore;
Your voice like gentle music will charm my heart no more.
No more I'll kiss her ruby lips or press her lily-white hand,
For I must die a shameful death all in a foreign land.


1.2 lovely] "happy" was written first, but stricken through and replaced by a word that the transcriber read as "lonely"; but which I think is "lovely"; cf. the version sung by Captain Archie S. Spurling in Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth, Minstrelsy of Maine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927), p. 214, that sung by Captain Henry Burke in William Main Doerflinger, Shantymen and Shantyboys (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), p. 136; and that sung by Howard Morry in Kenneth Peacock, Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1965), Vol. 3, p. 842; and Stan Hugill's version in Shanties and Sailor's Songs (London: H. Jenkins, and New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), p. 225. The rejected "happy" is the word found in the majority of versions.
2.1 own(?)] –These letters are repeated in the following word and so easily compared in terms of handwriting; they seem unproblematic, but they are preceded by a misshapen circle that may be a capital "O". That is the cause of the uncertainty as to what is intended here.
3.4 cane] the field notes and transcript have "can"       doth] "does" is written above it.
4.1 as a fine a] "the finest" is written above it. Probably what is intended is "as fine a ship as" in the original reading and "the finest ship that" as the revision.
4.3 bark] a word that is legible as "ship" has been erased and "bark" written in place of it. But there was more written after "bark," almost a complete line, that is illegible. From what remains, it is probably "when the wind blew off her steel," as in the following line. Apparently the words were written twice in the process of recording the song as sung, and later corrected with the eraser; there are other places in the field notes that appear to have been erased and written over.
4.4. set] "set set" in the field notes and transcript.
At the end of this stanza Cowell recorded comment: " 'Of course I don't know what this all means, but it's sure enough the way the song goes,' says EWF."
12.3-4 It appears that the singer at first sang here the text belonging to 13.1-2. Catching the mistake, he sang instead the proper second half of the stanza and proceeded to stanza 13, with the comment "There! I like a song to make sense!"

Warde Ford's comment "Of course I don't know what this all means, but it's sure enough the way the song goes" expresses what must have been the experience of many singers as the song moved inland with the westward spread of logging. The problem is twofold, both aspects arising from the landsman's unfamiliarity with the sailor's specialized vocabulary First, corrruption of the text, which is probably responsible for "When the wind blew off her steel" and for "royal sky-sails," the sky sail being the one above the royal. Second, correctly preserved text incomprehensible to landlubbers: "going eighteen by the reel." Compare version A in Roland Palmer Gray's Songs and Ballads of the Maine Lumberjacks: "I have oftentimes seen our gallant ship / As the wind lay abaft her wheel, / With the royal and the sky-sail set aloft, / Sail nineteen by the reel."

One point of interest in this version is that the initial journey is to New Britain, the most distant destination of any recorded, and the most improbable and irrelevant to the plot. However, the narrator only goes aboard the vessel bound for New Britain; there is nothing about his arrival there, and he meets the ill-fated Captain Moore in "Trimore," the form in which Tramore, the port serving Waterford, usu-ally appears in this song. In this it resembles the version taken down by Gale Huntington from Welcome Tilton—see Northeast Folklore 8 (1967): 35-37—in which there is no initial voyage abroad at all; the encounter with the Captain occurs in the narrator's native Waterford, and the slaving voyage takes its departure directly from there. So the trip to New Britain constitutes a bit of an absurdity; one won

ders whether the singer knew where either New Britain or "Trimore" was, and whether he may have thought that the latter was a port in the former. Whether meeting the Captain in County Waterford represents the well-known process of distilling a song down to essentials (imperfectly carried through in the Ford version), or whether it represents an early form of the song, before the accretion of new matter from some song of emigration, is a question open to discussion.

Stephen