I learned both versions long before we recorded throgh the painstaking process of a combination of sight reading and using whatever musical instrument came to hand. The words and tunes come from SFSS and the feedback we got from Stan was "that's close enough" - praise indeed.

The additional verses are mine and these were used to pad the song out a bit.

The likely orginal use of the shanties is with a device for cotton stowing which is best described as a back-to-front corkscrew (thus the term "cotton screwing"). What this did was to pack/compress the cotton bales into the hold, thus shipping more tons of cargo.

On less sturdy and less watertight vessels this could be dangerous as it was know for the cotton to expand on getting wet and split the vessels' seams.

Hope that helps...