Gibb, your thoughts, especially in the final paragraph are intriguing. I've been trying to think about the differences between San Francisco and say, New Orleans, in the 1850's. Both were jumping places, but, I'm guessing, not the same at all when it came to chanty making. If our hypotheses about the "chanty, proper" call/response work song coming off of the plantations and down the rivers to the shipping ports with African American labor is credible, then one of the basic contextual components for this was slavery. There were probably some slaves in the San Francisco area, but I wouldn't think very many. In fact, I'm still wondering about the overall African American population on the West Coast in the 1850's.

Wouldn't it have been Chinese, and then perhaps Irish labor in San Francisco? Here I'm thinking of the building of the railroads. But what about on the docks? Gibb, your earlier quote about non-African American immigrants replacing both slave and free Blacks as a work force in the eastern ports and even in agriculture was very interesting. In very broad strokes, if that might have marked the beginning of the end of chanty-making in the eastern ports, then it roughly coincided with the rise of what might be seen as West Coast culture, where African American slave labor never was dominant.

In the latter third of the 19th century, Cape Horn and Frisco Bay certainly enter the lyrics of chanties, but they seem to be represented mainly by new "verses" and not new chanties or forms per se.

And then you have some major changes taking place. There is the gradual rise of steam power and iron clad ships. And there is the Civil War, which abolishes slavery. Very roughly speaking, it would seem that the combination of the freeing of the slaves and the Industrial Revolution not only caused the major population shifts to begin taking place in the Southern States, but it also must have directly affected the whole business of chanty making, which significantly, as far as we can tell, tapers off at just this point - say about 1870?

In one sense, the West Coast was never much a part of what one might call "the slave economy" of the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Ports (which is more accurate, I think, than to say "the Southern States"), and was perhaps ahead of the curve following the War in the east.

Of course, the end of slavery did not mean the end of African American call/response work songs. But with the shifting of populations, from South to North, for instance, the kinds of work shifted. In the second half of the 19th century we get a long of railroad building songs, or "hammer songs". And even here, John Henry has to do deal with the steam drill! In fact, John Henry might well be the symbol for the industrial demise of the African American work song. It seems to have survived, as a genre, primarily in the Southern penal context, into the middle of the 20th century.

Here, I'm thinking about both the concerns that Gibb raises and my primary issues in this thread about the West Coast/South Pacific chanty culture in the middle of the 19th century. I think they are definitely intertwined.