Russell again discusses sailor's songs in his THE ROMANCE OF JENNY HARLOWE (1889). This time, however, he is more opinionated.

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In fact, there are two distinct sorts of sailors' songs, compositions of which only a very few indeed are sung by sailors, and compositions which nobody but sailors ever dream of singing. These last are well worthy of brief consideration. Some reckless modern has hurled the execrable term "chanty" at them, and the word, I am sorry to say, has stuck. I suppose the etymology of it must be sought in the French verb chanter. The "chanty," as it is now the custom to call it—pronounced "shanty," I believe, but I am very unwilling to have anything to do with it—is the modern generic appellation of the mariner's working song or chorus. It may be presumed that there is no landsman who needs to be told that when sailors heave upon a windlass, or wind round a capstan, or haul upon ropes, one of them will break into a song, which the rest at regular intervals pick up in a rousing chorus. These are Jack's working songs, and they are to be heard only on board ship.
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Ouch! OK then, he really never heard 'chanty'! Still again -- I wonder where he first heard it. Has it been 'hurled' at sailors or landsmen by these 'moderns'?

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The words of these compositions might make the exclusiveness intelligible were it not that some of the melodies are so pretty, so plaintive, so catching, so full of the salt aromas of the deep, as to make one wonder that they should not long ago have found their way ashore, fitted to words more proper for the drawing-room and the concert hall, than Jack's rhymes to them. Such airs as "Across the Western Ocean," "The Plains of Mexico," "Yon rolling River," "Blow, Boys, Blow," and a few others—not many, I admit—harmonized by an able musician, and associated with good poetry, should scarcely fail, I think, to captivate the shore-going ear, and hold to it with scarcely less tenacity than may be witnessed in its adherence to maritime memory and sympathy.
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He has added SHENANDOAH and BLOW BOYS BLOW to his list.

I wonder if he read Adam's ROCKET of 1879. Lots of similarities in their expositions.

More on American origin of shanties:

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I think it may be taken that we owe the sailors' working song as we now possess it to the Americans. How far do these songs date back ? I doubt if the most ancient amongst them is much older than the century. It is noteworthy that the old voyagers do not hint at the sailors singing out or encouraging their efforts by choruses when at work. In the navy, of course, this sort of song was never permitted. Work proceeded to the strains of a fiddle, to the piping of the boatswain and his mates, or in earlier times yet, to the trumpet. The working song then is peculiar to the Merchant Service, but one may hunt through the old chronicles without encountering a suggestion of its existence prior ot American independence and to the establishment of a Yankee marine. It is at least certain that the flavour of many of these songs is distinctly Transatlantic. The melodies it might be impossible to trace. Just as " Yankee Doodle " is an old English air Americanized by the inspirations of the Yankee poet, so there may be many an old tune that owed its existence to British brains appropriated by the Boston and New York lyrists, and fitted to words so racy of the soil as to render the whole production as entirely Yankee to the fancy as are the stripes and stars or the cotton white canvas of the ships of the States.
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Attesting that despite steam, chanteys are still current:

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But the working chorus takes a distinctive character when you think of it in reference to the small crew of a merchantman. Captains and mates so well understand the heartening influence of the song upon the sailor's toil, that half the official rhetoric of the forecastle and the quarter-deck is formed of entreaties to tbe men to sing out; to " Sing and make a noise, boys ! " To " Heave and pawl! " To " Heave and raise the dead ! " To " Sing to it, lads; sing to it!" A new song will sometimes be as good as a couple of new men to a ship's forecastle; hence in the merchant service sailors' songs, in the strict sense of the expression, are of incalculable value. To be sure in these days steam and patent machinery have diminished something of the obligation of these chants. A donkey engine does its work without a chorus; it needs not a fiddler to set a steam capstan revolving. But the manual windlass is still plentiful, the capstan bar of our forefathers is not yet out of date, though the single topsail is halved there is yet the upper yard to masthead; and these, with a hundred other jobs to be done aboard a sailing ship, keep the sailors' sea-song actively current.
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Next he quotes from THE QUID (1832):

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An old sailor recalls with a sigh the heaving of the capstan of his day. " It is one of the many soul-stirring scenes," he says, " that occur on board when all hands are turned up ; the motley group that man the bars, the fiddler stuck in a corner, the captain on the poop, encouraging the men to those desperate efforts that seem to the novice an attempt at pulling up the rocks by the root. It is a time of equality; idlers, stewards and servants, barbers and sweepers, cooks and cooks' mates, doctors' mates and loblolly boys; every man runs the same road, and hard and impenetrable is that soul that does not chime in with the old ditties, 'Pull away now, my Nancy O!' and the long ' Oh !' that precedes the more musical strain of—
" ' Oh, her love is a sailor,
His name is Jemmy Taylor;
He's gone in a whaler
To Hie Greenland Sea.'

" Or—
" Oh! if I had her,
Eh, then, if I had her,
Oh ! how I could love her,
Black although she be!'"
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On improvisation, variability:

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The sailor's trick of improvising furnishes a very varied character to his working songs. A man having exhausted all the rhymes he knows, with a good deal of pulling and hauling still remaining, will often venture upon a doggerel of his own instead of repeating what he has already said. "Words of certain songs have indeed a permanency, but I doubt if it would be possible to express the peculiar nature of the sailors' working songs, by printing the verses which are supposed to accompany the airs. Words are varied again and again; line after line is made up on the instant; the reader may reject with confidence any collection that is offered to him as samples of the poetry which Jack roars out when he heaves or drags. In truth, but a very little of the real thing would bear the light of day.
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Lastly, he claims to be very familiar with shanties first hand. OK, I'll buy it. Funny thay he never prints any verses though.

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I remember a lady writing to ask me to assist her in forming a collection of the sailors' working songs, and I could not help thinking that if by Jack's songs she meant the "chanties," as they are now called, she would be starting on a quest which I might expect to hear in a very little time she had relinquished with a hot face and a shocked heart. No, the mariner is not very choice in his language. His working ditties are a little too strong for print, on the whole. The few examples I have seen in type are Bowdlerized out of knowledge. He may have reformed in this matter of late years; he may sing nothing to-day that is not virginal in purity; but in my time—and it is not so very long ago either—his working choruses reeking with forecastle fancies, were as full of the unrepeatable and the unprintable as his biscuit was of weevils. In sea stories, however, the sailors' working song is seldom or never given. Dana will speak of the crew having struck up such and such an air—"Cheerily, Men," or "Heave to the Girls," or "Tally hi ho, you know," but he confines his reference to the titles.
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