New Book Anthologizes Songs from Shipboard Journals

CAMSCO Music of East Windsor, N.J., announces publication of
Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor,
a major anthology of folk songs and parlor songs excavated
from nineteenth-century sailors' shipboard journals. The author-editor-compiler is Stuart M.
Frank, senior curator of the world-famous New Bedford Whaling Museum, executive director
emeritus of the Kendall Whaling Museum, and renowned authority on sailor songs and
shipboard music. The product of 30+ years of research, the book features authentic historic
renditions of more than two hundred songs with words and music. It will be officially launched
with a concert and book-signing at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Mass., on
October 16th.
The book, which runs to 525 pages, is an annotated anthology of 232 songs, with texts
recovered unchanged from historic nineteenth-century shipboard manuscripts, here reunited
with their original melodies. This musical archaeology thus reconstructs the original materials
and presents the words and music (in many cases, several versions of each) in the same form
that they were known to landsmen and seamen more than a century and a half ago. And Dr.
Frank has been conscientious in providing a wealth of historical notes, identifying the sources
and provenance of the folksongs, the composers and lyricists of parlor songs and music-hall
pieces, and explaining the technical lingo that characterizes some of the authentic sailor-songs
that were made up by the mariners themselves.
The ballads and songs are organized into 18 chapters and seven appendices. The first chapter,
"Classical Songs of the Sea," includes the handful of songs so characterized by Herman Melville
in Moby Dick, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr., in Two Years Before the Mast. Others are well
known traditional ballads, here presented in the earliest versions ever collected from tradition,
some are the only versions ever
encountered in tradition in North America, while a few are obscure and hitherto unknown. It
was not until the very late 19th and early 20th centuries that collectors like Cecil J. Sharp and
John Lomax, and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, began gathering songs "in the field,"
from singers themselves, in rural Britain and Ireland, and in the Southern mountains and remote
northern backwashes of America. By that time many traditional songs that had been sung for
centuries had already vanished from tradition, or failed to be harvested before they became
extinct. The ballads and songs Jolly Sailors Bold, transcribed by sailors in the 1840s , '50s, and
'60s, are therefore among the earliest texts ever encountered. They include early versions of
materials known only from much later manifestations — by which time they had often been
significantly changed — and more than a handful that were hitherto unknown and are now
restored to the repertoire.
In chapters entitled "Songs about Women," "Songs of Parting," "Deepwater Songs,"
"Ballads of Lovers Lost and Lovers Spurned," and so on, a broad spectrum of sea songs, love
songs, patriotic paeans, and comical ditties is represented. There are also three chapters of
authentic, sailor-made whaling songs, one of fiddle tunes and dance melodies, and one that has
31 parlor songs, which were originally commercially produced by known composers but are here
somewhat changed in the sailors' hands. A glossary assists with technical terms, footnotes
clarify contextual matters, and there are handy indexes of lyricists and composers, and of titles
and first lines.
Author Stuart Frank has been studying and performing folk songs since 1964, and
specializing in sea songs since he was a graduate student at Yale in 1971. He originated the sea
chantey programs at Mystic Seaport in 1972 and the annual Sea Music Festival and Symposium
there in 1979, when he began compiling this anthology in preparation for his Ph.D.
dissertation at Brown University, entitled Ballads and Songs of the Whale-Hunters, 1825-1895.
Since then he has written The Book of Pirate Songs and several other nautical songbooks,
including Sea Chanteys and Sailors' Songs: An Introduction for Singers and Performers, and a
Guide for Teachers; Songs of the Polly, 1795; "Musick on the Brain": Shipboard Tunes, 1854-
1869; and Oooh, You New York Girls! The Urban Pastorale in Ballads and Songs about
Sailors Ashore in the Big City. He has been musical and historical advisor for programming as
diverse as equity productions of Shakespeare; twelve network, BBC, A&E, and PBS television
documentaries on seafaring; has appeared on the Studs Terkel show; and with his wife, Dr.
Mary Malloy, has made concert tours across North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and
made several recordings. He is also author of books, monographs, and forensic treatises on
whalers' scrimshaw, a sailor-art that provides some of the illustrations for Jolly Sailors Bold..
Frank's anthology is in good company, as CAMSCO Music is the publisher of new editions
of Bertrand Harris Bronson's four-volume companion masterwork, Traditional Tunes of the Child
Ballads, as well as Bronson's single-volume condensation; The Singing Tradition of the Child
Ballads. Jolly Sailors Bold is available for $50.00 hardbound and $40.00 softbound from the
New Bedford Whaling Museum (www.whalingmseum.org) and directly from CAMSCO Music
(camscomusic.com). Information about the concert and Whaling History Symposium at the
Whaling Museum is available on the museum website www.whalingmseum.org or by email at
kallen@whalingmuseum.org.
Title: Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor
Author: Stuart M. Frank, Ph.D., Senior Curator, New Bedford Whaling Museum
Publisher: CAMSCO Music, 145 Hickory Corner Road, East Windsor, NJ 08520
www.camscomusic.com
Contact: Dick Greenhaus • Telephone: 800 548-3655 • Email: dick@camscomusic.com
Date: 16 October 2010 • ISBN 978-1-935243-90-8
Collation: xxiv+527pp; contents, 18 chapters, glossary, 7 appendices, 2 indexes
Retail: Hardbound $50.00 • Softbound $40.00
Contents: Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Few Words about Chanteys
1 — Classical Songs of the Sea: An Eighteenth-Century Garland 1
2 — The Girl I Left Behind Me: Songs About Women 21
3 — The Sailors' Farewell: Songs of Parting 39
4 — Jolly Sailors Bold: Deepwater Songs and Ballads 66
5 — Heave Away, My Hearties: Deepwater Chanteys 91
6 — Battle Pieces: Naval, Military, and Patriotic Ballads 109
7 — A Bonny Bunch of Roses: Napoleonic Songs and Ballads 131
8 — Tarry Trousers: Ballads of Lovers Lost and Lovers Spurned 145
9 — Love Impeded: Ballads of Family Opposition to Lovers 169
10 — Love Entangled: Ballads of Lovers' Disguises and Tricks 185
11 — The Jolly Roving Tar: Ballads of Faithful and Unfaithful Lovers 207
12 — Terra Incognita: Comic and Convivial Songs 242
13 — Lubbers and Swabs: Miscellaneous Songs and Curiosities 258
14 — There She Blows: Classic Whaling Songs 281
15 — The Whaleman's Lament: Original Whaling Songs 315
16 — "Plenty of Music": Two Voyages of the Bark Kathleen 342
17 — "Musick on the Brain": Frederick Howland Smith's Tune List 357
18 — Hurrah For the Sea: Parlor Songs of Ships and Seafaring 380
Appendix 1 — Nature and Nancy: Dibdin's Songs 429
Appendix 2 — How Cheery Are the Mariners: Sailors' Parlor Songs… 439
Appendix 3 — The King of the Boundless Sea: Selected Whaling Poems 446
Appendix 4 — The Homebound Whaleman 454
Appendix 5 — John Martin's Musical Programme 456
Appendix 6 — Biographical Notes on the Diarists and Journal-Keepers 460
Appendix 7 — Inventory of Additional Song Texts 475
References 497
Bibliography 507
Glossary of Technical Terms 520
Index of Lyricists and Composers 522
Index of Titles, Alternate Titles, First Lines, and Tunes 522