The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #145654   Message #4187992
Posted By: Gibb Sahib
09-Sep-23 - 12:33 AM
Thread Name: A.L.Lloyd & Sea Chanties
Subject: RE: A.L.Lloyd & Sea Chanties
Recent example of Lloyd's products causing confusion:

Here's a clip of "Shanties and their Usage Workshop" from Glasgow Shanty Festival, 2 September 2023.

(links to a public post on Facebook)

The song is Lloyd's "Wild Goose Shanty." I guess it's a demonstration of how Lloyd's song "would be" used if it had existed? Or it's a discussion of how to operate a brake windlass whilst singing and Lloyd's song is offered as an example of such a song?

Strange that the song has no discernible pulse and it's asymmetrical. Hey, aren't shanties those *rhythmical* songs for giving time-coordination to sailors' work? At least that's what Webster's says. And it's what the folk performers remind audiences when they want to add a halo of interest around their material like, "This isn't *just* any old song, this is a SHANTY! Yes, you see, it's a *special* song... a song for sailors' work, ooooh!" Yet where is the rhythm? Where is the meter? How on earth is the person imitating the pumping of a brake windlass imagining those motions for a song that gives no sensible cues to motion?

(How is it that these people, who have made their own version, are actually singing more like a shanty? I want them in my crew.)

***
Here's some balderdash from Lloyd (1972) saying that this shanty goes slower "by nature"? He really means, by his choice to make the song like that and pretend that was how he found it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ8YC7iOsEg