The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #126347   Message #2857814
Posted By: John Minear
06-Mar-10 - 04:13 PM
Thread Name: From SF to Sydney - 1853 Shanties Sung?
Subject: RE: From SF to Sydney - 1853 Shanties Sung?
Good work, Lighter! Are we to take Kemble's edition as the "authoritative edition"? If so, it gives us "Round the Corner, Sally" as an early chanty with multiple attestations. And it gives another significant early attestation for "Grog Time of Day". It would seem to remove "Cheerily Men" from Dana's "list". However, Dana does mention "Cheerily Men" in actual use in at least four other places (in the 1911 edition from Google), on p. 118 to cat the anchor, on page 197 to bring the anchor to the head, on page 301 to bring the topsails to the masthead, and on page 316 at the halyards.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NM4PAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA118&dq=%22Cheerily+Men%22&lr=&cd=13#v=onepage&q=%22Cheerily%20Men%22&f=false

So some version of "Cheerily Men" was being used whether or not Dana included it in the famous "list". I don't know what to do about the other two chanties that have all of a sudden disappeared. As I recall the earlier discussions, there were suggestions for what "Dandy ship and a dandy crew" and "Tally high ho!" might be in the later literature, but nothing really conclusive on either one of them.

The more troubling question though is why would Dana make these changes in this paragraph. It seems like he lost control of his first edition in 1840 to the publishers and later regained his copyright and "revised" the book for the 1869 edition thirty years later. Which is the "correct" version? Presumably the "original manuscript". It seems a strange place for the publishers to edit something. Were they prohibitionists?

Still no sign of Hugill's mysterious additions though. I wonder if they might be referred to somewhere else in the Kemble edition? It was published in 1964, after Hugill's book in 1961, so it would seem doubtful that he had seen it. Perhaps he had an original 1840 first edition, or his sources did. Lighter, can you do a quick run-through to see if "Roll the Old Chariot", "Cheer Up, Sam", and "Neptune's Raging Fury" are mentioned?