Nice work again, Gibb! I completely agree with your take on present-day shanty singing.

Hugill is absolutely the best single authority for words and music. But he conflates his texts - partly to get the book published at all, partly because, as he frankly tells us, he always sang the songs from memory and seems never to have written them down while he was a shantyman himself. I'm often struck by how far superior Hugill's versions are to those recalled by Doerflinger's shantymen and others.

Hugill's versions, except when he indicates otherwise, are therefore partly as he remembers them (which includes minor forgetting and adding), partly extended by the inclusion of as many published stanzas as he could find (and he may have tweaked these slightly), and in a case like "Boney," partly arranged in the most rational order.

An unusually creative guy like Hugill must have invented any number of his own verses while at sea. There's no way of knowing how many of his own improvisations appear in his texts: possibly many, possibly none. There's no reason to assume either that, decades later, he could (or felt any need to) distinguish his own verses from any others. As a genuine shantyman, anything he may have sung was "authentic." But from looking at Hugill's work alone, we can't know what was likely to have been sung in the mid 19th C., for example.

I'm often struck by how far superior Hugill's versions are to those recalled by Doerflinger's shantymen and others.


More opinions:

Except for the nature of the tunes, actual shanty singing wasn't nearly as compelling as folkies think. The shantyman's indispensible talents were a strong voice, a good repertoire of songs, either a good number of verses or the ready ability to improvise, and more or less the ability to carry a tune.

Like people today, many sailors had poor voices or were tone-deaf: that wouldn't keep them from chorusing. We know that except for black Caribbeans, sailors almost never sang shanties in harmony. Acoustics on shipboard, in the open air, with all sorts of ambient noise, were poor. (Nowadays we think the ambient creakings and clankings are romantic.) Furthermore, unless there were a good many people on shore listening (not uncommon), the shanty singers had no real incentive to "sound good." They were doing heavy work, and the shanty's sole purpose was to help do it more efficiently: one reason why bawdy and satirical verses were so popular when nobody else could hear them. That's what Huntington meant when he said that sailors didn't think of shanties "as music." They had little reason to record them in logs and journals because they were so easy to remember, so undignified in their lyrics, so dependent on improvisation and migrating verses, and so unlike socially valued music.

None of the above is meant to trash shanties or modern shanty singers. I'm simply trying to imagine real shanties as they existed in a world rather different from our own.