The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #145866 Message #3380585
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
23-Jul-12 - 06:28 PM
Thread Name: Stan Hugill uncensored
Subject: RE: Stan Hugill uncensored
I met an English woman who knew Stan Hugill from festivals who was still very pissed off that Stan would not sing the uncensored songs when she was in the room.
Precisely. Of course he wouldn't - he'd have regarded it as deeply discourteous and wouldn't have dreamed of doing so. I don't think that was in any way untypical of his generation.
But the "expurgated" words were just as authentic as the "censored" version. It would depend on the company - in port where there woud be women present or if there were women present on ship, passengers or family, the shanty man would watch his mouth.
That's what Stan said anyway. Modern day mores might assume that saltwater sailor wouldn't give a monkey about that kind of thing, but I rather think they are out of touch with how earlier generations actually were. And remember, even aside from this, there wasn't any business of crowd anonymity involved - it was the shanty man who determined how the sog went and if there were complaints from lady passengers they'd be directed at him.
Moreover in the latterdays of sail the crews were relatively small - making the shanties even more important as a way of getting maximum working efficiency. Stan's illustrations bring out the way the work team using the shanties were relatively small. ..... ....................
Back in 1961 I used to go to Cecil Sharp House to soing in sessions there, and also in a spin-off club we set up in a pub round the corner called the York and Albany. When Peter Kennedy was setting up the recording sessions for an LP which was issued as Shanties of the Seven Seas, the club was a convenient source for a crew to help out. In the LP we were referred to as "the York and Albany Crew".
Stan Hugill wrote of us in the LP's notes "...after a little tuition in how these songs were applied when heaving and hauling,(they) soon became a rantin' roarin' crew of Johns supplying wild hooraw choruses with all the boisterousness and fierceness of Blackball Packet Rats". Thank you for that Stan, I still treasure the testimonial...
What that meant in practice was, for example that he found us a length of electric cable so that we could use it for hauling away when appropriate, and he had us trudging round in a circle for the capstan shanties. One point - he also wrote in his notes that "One fault noticeable to oldtimers is that we sing these shanties rather faster than would be done on shipboard."
During the breaks between recording shanties I can remember Stan sharing some of the rougher versions of verses that would only be sund out at sea, when there weren't ladies on board. They weren't that rough by modern standards.