The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #135431 Message #3090782
Posted By: Gibb Sahib
07-Feb-11 - 07:27 PM
Thread Name: Earliest Commercial Shanty Recordings
Subject: RE: Earliest Commercial Shanty Recordings
Brezhnev,
Define "commercial recordings" however you like. I've no interest in limiting it, except for the practical purpose of this thread. The OP, Bob Walser, is intimately familiar with the field-recordings contained in the Carpenter Collection. He also knows we'd be familiar with, e.g. the field recordings made by William Doerflinger for Library of Congress. So when he is asking for examples of "commercial recordings," we can assume he doesn't want people chiming in with that stuff. OK?
In reality, the "English" collectors got both Folk Songs AND Shanties from the singers they encountered, so it was easy to meld them into one "music".
Easy indeed -- but potentially misleading and none the less notable. Their predecessors did not do that, as they were "closer" to the living practice of shantying in its heyday and had a different frame of reference. Cecil Sharp's singers could probably also sing pop songs, yet he managed to avoid melding those into "one music." In fact, in his ridiculously titled "English Folk-Chanteys" he deliberately excluded what he deemed were popular song-based chanties. Such an act would certainly influence the perception of chanties for someone reading his collection. It's a good thing that he didn't know that many of the chanties he did include were based off popular songs, or else it might have been scanty indeed! The a priori frame of reference of the song collectors influenced what they chose to collect and how to present it. So yes, their work would have a specific influence on how later generations perceived the genre. And these perceptions would influence how performers chose to perform the songs -- even within the limitations/conventions of their era.