I think I would agree about shanty titles sometimes being misleading. There really are no definitive versions, both in tune and text.

In fact, if I can get on my soapbox for a moment here, I'm irked by all the threads on Mudcat about what are the best songs or dance tunes or whatever. And while I'm on the soapbox, this is exactly why I don't care for the "Rise Up Singing" book. Rise Up Singing is one collection of songs. It is by no means a definitive collection of folk songs and should not be thought of as a song bible. Whew, sorry about that, but I do feel better now.

Oh yeah, we're talking about shanties. Right.

As mentioned earlier, it's unfortunate that many people consider any song about the sea to be a shanty. To further complicate things some shanties were originally music hall songs or folk songs heard by sailors and taken to sea to be turned into shanties, like Hoby Deri Dando (sp?). Stan Hugill is a great source but he was not always totally correct about everything. Greg mentions seven titles in his original posting here and I realize that we're only talking about references from one book but there are probably loads of shanties lost in time. And some of the shanties in existing collections are probably made up for publication anyway. What I'm refering to here are shanties whose lyrics are too artsy to have been sung by hairy shellbacks at sea.