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Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey

DigiTrad:
CONESTOGA ON THE JORDAN ROAD
CROSSED OLD JORDAN'S STREAM
DEEP RIVER
JORDAN IS A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL
RIVER OF JORDAN
ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL

Lighter	11 Sep 25 - 10:19 AM
Gibb Sahib	12 Sep 25 - 08:43 AM
Lighter	12 Sep 25 - 01:20 PM
Gibb Sahib	14 Sep 25 - 12:57 AM
Lighter	14 Sep 25 - 08:39 AM
GUEST,Phil d'Conch	19 Sep 25 - 04:36 AM
Gibb Sahib	19 Sep 25 - 07:48 AM
GUEST,Phil d'Conch	20 Sep 25 - 09:07 PM

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Subject: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: Lighter
Date: 11 Sep 25 - 10:19 AM

Truth (Perth, W.A.), Oct. 20, 1906:

ON THE OLD WIND JAMMERS (by a Glasgow Captain)...Another famous capstan chanty, originally a cotton-rolling song, was "Roll, Jordan, Roll." While lying of Liberty Island on [sic] the Hudson River, I watched an American ship getting under weigh, and the crew (all colored gent.'s) were singing "Roll, Jordan, Roll." It sounded grand in the quiet night. First came the chantyman's verse --

    Hard down the helm, stand by the spanker,
      Topsail halliards lower;
    De ship come down, let go de big anchor,
      And de sailors come ashore.

Then followed the thick voices...in a bellowing roar:

    Roll, Jordan, roll; roll, Jordan, roll;
      We're all bound away
      To heaven some day
    To see the Jordan roll."

The "chantyman's verse" would be tough to squeeze into either tune of the spiritual that I'm aware of; presumably the melody was different. ("Rolling Home" would be a good fit.) The chorus, however, is close to the "standard."

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 12 Sep 25 - 08:43 AM

Fair point about fitting the solo lines given to the tune. The original Roll, Jordan, Roll is already close enough to the chanty form, so why make it harder with those extra syllables? Unless that just happened to be a non-representative verse...or the writer half made it up. It verges on literary poetry. I should think a simple "yes, my Lord" for choruses would sound better to the average chantyman than this silly (to my mind) "topsail halliards lower."

Still, I could fit it pretty easily.

xx-x xxxx x-x- ----
x-x- x-x- x--- ----
x/ xxxx x-xx x-x- ----
xx/ x-x- x-x- x--- ----

"lower" is one syllable to match "[a]shore"

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: Lighter
Date: 12 Sep 25 - 01:20 PM

I agree that the stanza sounds too literary to be true.

But "famous" suggests the writer had heard it a number of times. Maybe the lines are just a hodgepodge of what he thought or wished he remembered.

But since a chantey man might sing anything he wanted, the salient point here is "Roll, Jordan, Roll" was sometimes used at the capstan on American ships.

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 14 Sep 25 - 12:57 AM

Agreed. And interesting.

Still, I'm uncomfortable with the heavy work being done by the word "famous"!

Following that with "originally a cotton-rolling song" doesn't help the case, since I've never seen evidence of that and I'm not sure how the writer would have knowledge of that.

There is some interesting stuff in that article along with some weird stuff. He says "Across the Western Ocean" was "one of the oldest capstan chanties." Funny enough, a chanty by that title *is* among the oldest (in Nordhoff). But as for a capstan, no. And then what he goes on to quote is some form of "All For Me Grog" rather than the expected song. Confusing!

Captain David Bone was from Glasgow, and shipped in Australia in the 1890s... and used the "chanty" spelling. Maybe some early thoughts from him?

***

According to _The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké._ (ed., 1988), "negro boatmen" transporting the author from Beaufort, SC to St. Helena Island, in 1859, sang "Roll, Jordan, Roll" while rowing, followed by another spiritual. This supports the sense (also supported by material in _Slave Songs from the United States_) that some singers had abandoned secular repertoire for work activities by this time as part of a general shift to looking down on the secular songs.

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: Lighter
Date: 14 Sep 25 - 08:39 AM

Gibb, my stupid wild-ass guess (or SWAG) is that the skipper just assumed it was a "cotton-rolling song," because the chorus urged Jordan to "roll" and he stereotypically associated black people with cotton.

"Famous" may mean only that he knew the title, presumably from print, as an African-American spiritual.

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 19 Sep 25 - 04:36 AM

Lyr Add: Roll, Jordan, Roll
Origins: Georgia Sea Island Boat Songs

I never managed to place Roll Jordan (Tree of Life &c&c) in a work environment, land or sea. And I seemed to have lost track of my copy of Grimké but, if memory serves, it's not the same 1988 volume as Gibb's and there was no mention of a pre-war journey to Beaufort or St. Helena.

If one keeps in mind, management sings the verse and labour gets the chorus; the St. Helena Experimenters et al were certainly new management; ergo new repertoire comes with.

Driftier: There was no way in heaven the newly arrived 'Yankees' could understand and transcribe natural Sea Island Creole lyrics. The singers must switch to a greatly simplified colonial English to be understood at all. And if any author writes in a spoken word accent it's very likely deliberate schtick for the benefit of the reader. Good intentions aside, better to think of the Port Royal materials as a kind of imported Christian minstrelsy/Tom Show. 'Based on a true story' &c.

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 19 Sep 25 - 07:48 AM

Sorry, it wasn't 1859—it was 1862!

page 128

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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' as a Chantey
From: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
Date: 20 Sep 25 - 09:07 PM

I've posted a link to here and the full journal paragraph to the Sea Island thread. Good stuff!

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