Some here might be mildly interested in—or amused by—this graphic I made.

"A Partial Taxonomy of American Maritime Music"

The context for the graphic is to facilitate and consolidate some discussions in a course I teach about "American Maritime Music" (the boundaries in the title of which are deliberately fuzzy). So, what's in the graphic must be very selective and on-point.

The graphic attempts to show, in haphazard combination, SOME* of the relationships between AND approaches to categorization of things under the headings of "maritime music/sound" (quickly zooming into Anglophone sailing ship contexts) and "American music" (focused on parsing certain items relevant to the discussions). The end result, rather than a useful taxonomy in any general sense, is to illustrate 1) the position of the chanty genre/form of song and 2) common ways of conceptualizing "chanty" as a category.

The two "sides" (American Music / Maritime Sound) function to make categories #4 and #5 possible. The overall structure wants to account for dichotomies like: vocal/instrumental, work/leisure, group/individual, maritime/terrestrial, formA/formOTHER, short/long, song/cry. I think each person's perspective on which of such dichotomies are significant, and where they fall on each side of the (prioritized) dichotomies, constitutes in sum their "take."


*Sorry, "celeusma" didn't make the cut.