Perhaps Morris is saying, 'this is a song, and we used in as a chanty' which isn't the same thing as saying, 'this is a chanty'.

I should clarify. Chanty, folk song, popular song, etc. aren't necessarily exclusive categories. --Well, not in the language I or Hugill is using. For these purposes, if it was used as a work song reasonably consistently, no matter how it originated, then it was a chanty. (Leave aside my speculations about the historical meanings of 'chanty' at earlier points -- that is just related to historical development ideas, not this point.) So if people were singing, for instance, "Hob y Deri Dando" at the capstan, then it *was* a chanty, too (though of course it was primarily known as a folk/popular song).

Stan Hugill's approach was to be very inclusive. If he had *any* reliable information or good reason to believe that a song had been used for work on ships, he included it among the shanty repertoire.

Now that I see your list of Davies' adapted shanties (thanks, sian!), I believe that Hugill would have seen that but not included those songs among the repertoire as shanties because they were new creations, not sung by sailors. However, the three Welsh-language songs that he did include were included on the basis of the testimony of his informants that they were sung as work songs. I have no reason to doubt that they were actually sung as chanties. Moreover, the Welsh-language verses/versions would have been specifically what his informants said were sung when being used as shanties. (In other words, he would not have been so presumptuous to present non-chanty versions, pulled from the common folk singing practice, as shanty versions.)

To belabor the point: Morris is saying 'this is that famous song, you know? Well, we used it as a chanty. [Which for Hugill's and my purposes = we can count it as a chanty] And here's how it went when we sang it as a chanty."

So I believe Hugill provides genuine evidence that at least three Welsh songs -- sung in Welsh language -- were chanties (regardless of their origins). The statement of Davies that there were no Welsh-language shanties is what caused me to question that.

The "Marco Polo" verse might not actually be that hard to track down; I was just wondering if it was an obvious thing, to anyone reading this thread. Trying to rule out J. Glyn Davies as the source (Dr Price's post seemed somewhat suggestive that it may have been.) Chanty singing in the revival context is very much a "broken" tradition, in the sense that if something from the oral tradition did not go down in a book (or on a recording, less often), then it disappeared. Then, that was picked up again by singers with the book or recordings as the sources. Not all, but perhaps the majority of verses that people sing in the newly developed oral tradition can be traced to some book or recording. As a possible case in point, "Rownd yr Horn", from what sian has said, may be simply revived having used Hugill's text as the source. It's likely (but not certain -- I am not killing myself over it) that the "Marco polo" verse will turn up in a published source at at least I will find a recording that popularized it.

So, my hypothesis is that if the Welsh had this song tradition which could be so easily adapted to the work at hand on board, it would be easy enough to use their indigenous tradition and, if someone wanted to explain them using the word 'chanty, shanty' … yeh; ok. No skin off our noses.

I tend to agree. This would be similar to the case of other non-English-language "shanties".

>>Hugill continues: Sometimes 'Borth' was sung about instead of London, with 'torth' (loaf) as the rhyming word in the second line.

Pardon? Apart from that changing the meter, it makes no sense. 'On the road as I was going to Borth, I met a loaf tailor.' He either didn't know whereof he spoke, or he made a balls-up of explaining what he meant.

Oops, sorry, that was in reference to the first verse of the song (which I didn't write out)...which makes reference to a woman swallowing a "brick". Here she would be swallowing a loaf.

And yes, the 'n' in "Hob y..." is just randomness...it's how Hugill wrote it out, though he did know the real name, too. So he was likely describing how it was specifically sung to him.