This may not clarify much :-), but I just want to be sure I haven't left wrong impressions.

Gibb Sahib wrote:

I've been subjected to a zillion 21st century renditions of the song at this point, but I don't remember ever hearing a VI / F chord there. That's wild. And it would seem to prematurely ruin the whole surprise of the chorus...which is where the F comes in and takes us into pop territory.

Yes. That D chord on "word" is powerful, because it leaves the modality of the song unresolved: we don't know if it's Aeolian or Dorian until the word "bring" in the chorus.

But am F chord is consonant there; it's just not interesting.

I just assumed the chord on "name" was iv / Dm. It's the expected chord in the song which has an F note in the melody AKA a natural minor scale AKA call it "Aeolian" if you like!

But the chord in Colquhoun is IV, not iv. That is, D (actually DaddG), not Dm. I tried it today, with D, Dm, and F. (I can't use a DaddG; that semitone sounds terrible.) D is interesting, F is dull, Dm is worse, to my ears. But if I had just been played the melody cold, without having known it, I probably would have used an F chord, because that's what I'd expect in an Aeolian song.

To be sure, I have a bias. As I've said, I learned this c. 1981 from Larry Carpenter, who learned it in New Zealand in the 1970s, and who (even though he probably isn't anyone anyone here has heard of) does seem to have helped popularize it in the United States, sending recordings to Gordon Bok and others.

At the time, I wasn't much of a guitarist, and he was very good. So I followed his chords, which are almost the Colquhoun chords (Conquhoun uses DaddG; Carpenter -- and I -- use D).

The Songs of a Young Country version of the score of Wellerman I have (from John Roberts!) lists "D add G" as the chord for the "name" bar.

Which is what Colquhoun has, also, in both the second and third editions. If you don't have a copy of Colquhoun, I could photograph the page for you; contact me privately. As I say, Carpenter used just plain D, and that spread.

Maybe John gave you the Colquhoun chords. But I can imagine another possibility. When John was talking about recording "Wellerman," I commented that I would love to hear him play it on concertina -- and he told me he was working on it on banjo!

Now I tried "Wellerman" on banjo twenty or so years ago, and concluded that it works better on guitar -- frailing makes it too easy to regularize the meter, and I hate hearing that. :-) But, again, the song is deeply stuck in my brain in a way that it won't be for people who didn't learn it forty years ago! If John was fiddling with it on banjo in a fairly standard tuning and didn't use a fifth string capo, he's have a droning g on the fifth string. Maybe he somehow worked that into the D chord. Dunno. I never heard him play it; he just said he was working on it.

Dadgum me if I know what that's supposed to mean in exact notes (and I have a bachelor's degree in Music Composition and was a jazz bassist in an earlier life). As a musician today I just read it as "We're moving to D so we just need a solid D and A note foundation but on paper we need to make up a weird chord name on account of the fact that the melody has a non-chord tone and/or the guitarist felt like siding one finger up or down a fret."

Yeah. I think we're seeing the evidence of Colquhoun's non-folk background; he could play guitar, unlike a lot of people who arrange folk songs for piano, but he played piano first, and better.

No matter though. I actually think the modern version of the melody is an improvement. The original Colquhoun melody on "name of the ship was the B o T" is odd, IMHO. Why jump up to the octave? It's like you're shouting all of a sudden.

Personally, I like it, but then, I'm used to it. The D chord there does help, because it justifies the shift.

I do have an interesting observation: There is one place where my learned melody does not match the Song of a Young Country transcription. And it's in that measure -- but not on "name"; on "was the." Colquhoun's transcription has that on V (E). But I know it as a VII (G). Could the typesetters have set it wrong -- or is that why the chord on "name" is DaddG: Start on D but slip to G for "was the"?

Which is why I can never imagine it as a whalermen's traditional song.

Of course, if it actually goes back to the Weller Brothers era, it had a century and a half to get messed up. :-)