Thanks for reviving this thread, Gibb. I'd forgotten all about it.

You've jogged my memory of hearing Wyndham-Reade's rendition as a callow youth fifty years ago. I'd heard most of the Lloyd-MacColl chanteys by then, including MacColl's more traditional "Black Ball Line."

I thought W-R's sounded so weird, so authentic, so English! Englishness didn't matter, but authenticity, especially authentic weirdness, did.

I think this is one reason that L & M preferred modal tunes. Like the chanties themselves, they were markedly unlike the music the average anglophone audience was used to. That suggested (erroneously) that they were (or ought to be) the oldest, most valuable, most authentic artifacts from the vague, romanticized era many of us naively associated with traditional music.

That emphasis on modality, concertinas, hearty double entendre, narrative songs, "exoticness," and a taken-for-granted anti-elite bias, etc., are values in the revival performances of Lloyd and a few others that appealed to me and, I suspect, a great many others. It was so appealing and unusual it had to be authentic! History coming alive, which was one point of the revival.

And it was all backed by those sometimes equivocating, always authoritative-sounding liner notes!

Not a chantey, but has anyone mentioned that Lloyd, with a little inspiration from broadsides of the 1840's and a trad tune, was the effective creator of "The Trim-Rigg'd Doxy"?

In response to Roy Palmer's and Nick's question, "would I rather have Lloyd's creation or not?" I'd rather have "Doxy" than otherwise, though possibly not by much.

But enough drift. The chantey texts (mayb not the tunes) are a rather different case, once we remember just how extensively (even wildly) improvisational the texts could be when used for labor. See the Ranzo thread, for example.