> all the sea albums they did came with extremely sparse notes.

It depends what you mean by "sparse." Typically most of the back of the sleeve was covered in small print, with a general introduction and each song commented upon, generally by Lloyd.

They were "sparse" in terms of academic information, but appeared to the uninstructed (like me) to be the last word in scholarship.

Example, from "Off to Sea Once More" (1956):

"STORMALONG Romantic writers imagine the hero of this shanty as a legendary giant, a seafaring Paul Bunyan. He has become as much a figure of marine folklore as Davy Jones or Mother Carey. However, some old Cape Horners declare that Stormalong was a real man named John Willis, of Eyemouth, Berwickshire, who was one of the greatest of early nineteenth century West Indiaman skippers. There are two quite distinct versions of this shanty, one for halyards, the other, as here, for manning the capstan or the pumps."

Just the fact of the notes, and their detail, proclaims that this is the real thing, with factual commentary by genuine experts. Rarely did either MacColl or Lloyd say frankly that they'd changed anything. (An important exception are the collations in Riverside's multi-disk "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads," all of which are evidently acknowledged, possibly under the influence of PhD editor Ken Goldstein.)

Of course, maybe I was an exceptionally naive youth to trust anybody in show biz, regardless of how much history and folklore they could cite. However, neither the Clancy Bros., nor the Dubliners, enormously popular "folk" acts of the era, supplied comparable notes. And L & M's signature, unaccompanied singing, or singing with "folky" instruments like the concertina, appeared to be yet another stamp of authenticity.

I don't want to make too much of this, but many future scholars listened to L & M's albums with complete confidence that they were as close to 19th C. folk singing as a 20th C. human could get.

BTW, just how "prominent" *were* Stormy, Davy Jones, and Mother Carey in marine folklore? My impression is that they were, essentially, names or phrases only. (Though "Davy Jones" is said specifically to have been a name for the devil.)