This event described by the source (below) is interesting because it marks perhaps the first (or first I've seen!) instances of chanties being performed by "laymen". Although we don't know if, perhaps, some or all of the performers were ex-seamen, it seems to me that most or all were simply interested amateurs. They speak of preserving the songs – the first rumblings of a revival? As I said, Davis/Tozer's volume, which doesn't seem to have gotten much notice until its third edition, looks to have been the only publication in the 19th century that was created to facilitate performance of chanties by laypersons.

Audio recording was not yet envisioned. However, the interest in preserving and preservation by laypersons --grounds for a revival-- seems to have started not much more than a decade after people (e.g. Alden, 1882) were declaring chanties to be "dead."

1895        Manchester Literary Club. Papers of the Manchester Literary Club. Vol. 21. Manchester: John Heywood.

(Cross-posted in another thread)

4 Feb., 1895, at one of the weekly meetings of the Manchester Literary Club, J.B. Shaw presented a paper on chanties. It was accompanied by performances, with piano accompaniment.

Two sentences are verbatim copy of Alden's 1882 article, so that was used as a source on background. If they had piano accompaniment, there is a good chance they were using Davis & Tozer's Third Edition, published in the early 1890s, as it was the only source then with accompaniment. However, they *might* have made their own accompaniment.

The brief reads as follows.
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Sailors' Chanties.

Mr. J. B. Shaw contributed the principal paper. It dealt with Sailors' Chanties and other Sea Songs, and was illustrated by the singing of a number of these "chanties" and songs by Messrs. Derby, Butterworth, Dinsmore, Edmeston, Mercer, and Wilcock, who were accompanied on the piano by Mr. W. Noel Johnson. The reader said that "Sailors' Chanties" belonged to a time now no more. The typical "Jack " of the pre-propeller age has utterly vanished, has passed into the dusty domain of the archaeologist, and his real habits and customs will soon be forgotten. We should therefore make an effort to preserve the memory of his songs before the last man who heard them and can give testimony in regard to them is gone. The "Chanty-man," the chorister of the old packet ship, has left no successors. In the place of rousing "pulling songs" we now hear the rattle of the steam-winch, and the steamwinch or pump give us the rattle of cog-wheels or the hiss of steam instead of the wild choruses of other days. Sailors' songs might be divided into two classes, pulling songs and windlass songs. The former were used merely to aid the men when pulling on a rope, to pull at the same precise instant. The latter were intended to beguile the men while getting up the anchor or working the pumps into temporary forgetfulness of their prosaic labour. These songs are worth studying from various points of view. Musically they are most valuable, as showing how much they are characteristic of their subject, vocationally as proving the amount of impetus or encouragement needed by the singer in his work, and poetically by making known the feelings which animate a sailor's breast with regard to his home, his wife, his captain, and all that concerns him.
In the conversation which followed the reading of the paper, Messrs. Milner, Kay, Crosland, Chrystal, and Newton took part.
//