Gibb, I appreciate your coments on Scarborough and Talley. That saves me ploughing through them again. The last time I looked at them, I was not looking for chanties.

I think that this is an important hypothesis for us:

"I'd also like to (re)impress the idea that the work -- let's say halyard hauling -- and the singing were inseparable. By analogy, think of the way some African cultural groups don't use a distinct word for "music" alone. "Performance" includes singing, dancing, and drumming, all together by requirement. It may be inappropriate in those contexts to expect to only sing without dancing, say. The physical aspect is as much a part of it as the sound. This rings with the statements about "no hand was put on a rope without raising a song."

I reason that if the things were inseparable, that they also CAME *together*. That is, although earlier in history there were calls to help pull, there was also pulling *without* sound. I hypothesize that there was a historical moment, not when sailors just started singing a lot more, but when the inseparable paradigm of a certain kind of song with a certain method of action was introduced to the scene."

And, unless this had pretty much already happened by the 1850's, it wasn't likely to be generated on wharves at San Francisco! Wrong place, wrong culture. So these songs had to be imported to California by the sailors themselves, most likely. And, I'm wondering if the Black population of San Francisco was at all significant in this period, other than on board ship.