Lighter, the SERVICE AFLOAT reference uses "minor." I swear there are more, but I don't want to look for them, right now. In any case, I have been reading "minor" as some interpretation of listeners who aren't sure where to "file" the blue notes. They are between "major" and "minor," and I figure that, like when one does when he hears a phoneme contrast that doesn't exist in his own language, he files it as one with which he is familiar. I don't think 19th century writers had a clue how to file in "blue notes." The author from 1908, above, shows the beginnings of at least recognizing something that is to be considered on its own. If memory serves, Arnold, in Bullen's collection of 1914, also begins to take "note" of this tonality!

"Plaintive" suggests "minor" to me, even if they are not using the latter word. And I find that at odds with the fact that very few chanties as they have come down to us today are in minor modes. One possible explanation is that, again writers did not have a category for blue notes, and they just notated the songs as if they were in major modes (I realize this contradicts what I just said about "filing as minor," but I think there are different issues between notating and the lay-observers descriptions.) Or, possibly, when such songs were adopted by White sailors, the "blue note" tonality was not maintained; they became tunes in major.