Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 20 Oct 25 - 04:06 AM

CJB666 wrote There does but appear to be any other sources. Aha - an email elicited the title: "Whaling in early New Zealand", by A W Reed, 1960.

Just to people know: The Reed company was busy with popular history sorts of books around 1960, but their level of scholarship is not very high. They are not aimed at the scholarly market. (This doesn't contradict what you way, but I imported several of their books and was... less than impressed.)

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 03:06 AM

Kaikopere (I presume J.A.):

Thanks for the added ideas!

Were you the author of the circa 2002 (?) page about "Wellerman" on folksong.org.nz? If so: What a revision! Good on you.

Also: Can you say anything about where the Tommy Wood quotation, via Mike Harding, comes from? It's similar, but not the same as what Mike Harding posted in this thread. Did re-tell the story from Tommy Wood to you or somewhere?

Mike Harding, from this thread (paraphrased from remembered speech, or copied from text/email?):

In response to the world-wide interest and in preparation for a radio programme on New Zealand folk I contacted Tommy. From the source... 'From memory I came across the poem in a book on NZ sailors and as a folk singer in those days was collecting songs to sing at the clubs. I had mentioned it to Neil Colquhoun, then a fellow club member, who knew about it and hummed a rough guide to the tune. It became my song at the time, singing it at various clubs around until finally singing it on the album 'Songs of a Young Country'...unfortunately I have not got the book anymore. All I can remember was stories connected to whaling, exploring NZ and immigration ships, containing personal letters of life on board these ships, including poems...black and white sketches of ships, sailors etc...it was fairly old then [late 1960s?]! My late wife Margaret was a librarian and she brought it home after it had been removed off the shelves...The Wellerman was an actual poem in the book but not quite in rhyme I had to adjust some of the words to fit the tune that Neil and I managed to put together..'.

Mike Harding, from from webpage on _New Zealand Folk Songs?_:

...Mike Harding later spoke to him about it. He told Mike...

"I came across the poem in a book on NZ sailors. Unfortunately I have not got the book anymore. All I can remember was stories connected to whaling, exploring NZ and immigration ships, containing personal letters of life on board these ships, including poems... black and white sketches of ships, sailors etc. The Wellerman was an actual poem in the book but not quite in rhyme so I had to adjust some of the words."

I'm particularly fascinated by the part in the first quote that says, "I had mentioned it [i.e. the poem I/Tommy found in a book] to Neil Colquhoun, then a fellow club member, who knew about it and hummed a rough guide to the tune." So, Colquhoun knew about this poem, too? Sounds strange if Tommy came across it by chance in a book his wife brought home. And: Who hummed a rough guide to the tune? Neil or Tommy? Without a comma in the sentence, the grammar implies Neil hummed the tune, but commas are pesky things. I guess it was Tommy who hummed a rough tune. Is it the tune Tommy recorded in 1971 on the album? If so, why did Neil sing a different tune in 1969?

***
I just edited Wikipedia, incidentally. Someone had recently added to the article the "information" that the song was written "circa 1870." Their cited source was some article in a law journal about whether "viral shanties" can be copyrighted and in which the authors stated, without any source given, that "Wellerman" was "understood" to be 1870. Evidently they thought the facts didn't matter, as they wanted to just make their point about the legal status of hypothetical "shanties" composed in the 1870s.

Such articles as this one by the legal scholars were surely part of the fallout after 2021 #shantytok when journalists were jumping to write about the song and simply repeating non-reviewed statements that probably had their ultimate origin in the OLD old folksong.org.nz page.

Everyone reading here should note that Kaikopere's page on the site also includes audio of the 1969 NZBC broadcast. Fascinatingly, Colquhoun sings "Wellers' men." (I think that bit was omitted, for understandable reasons, from this Mudcat posting.)

Please forgive any mistakes I've made—it's getting hard to keep track of everything at this point!

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 04:07 AM

Gibb Sahib wrote: If so, why did Neil sing a different tune in 1969?

For what it's worth, John Roberts, who had better musical sense than I do, suggested to me (in a private communication) that Tommy's tune is basically Colquhoun's done in major (or that Colquhoun's is Tommy's converted to Aeolian, expressed as Dorian in Colquhoun's guitar arrangement). Just another little complication.

John Archer's work did reveal one very important point: That Colquhoun's tune preceded "The Lightning Tree."

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: GUEST,CJB666
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 08:17 AM

Does anyone has this recorded … ?

Date: 26 Jan 22 - 09:53 AM

BBC Radio 2 The Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe 19 January 2020

Bristol shanty singers the Longest Johns talk about surfing the recent wave of online shanties, and recording their new album, Smoke & Oakum.

23 days left to listen on BBC Sounds.

====

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Gibb Sahib
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 09:30 AM

see also: Michael Brown's blog post:
https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/explore-stories/stories/sound/soon-may-the-wellerma

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: GUEST,CJB666
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 01:47 PM

Michael Brown’s blog is wonderful. As well as an early arrangement of Wellerman there are 7 folk song programmes from the NZBC dating from 1969. The only fly in the ointment is a bloody tin whistle played too loud and out of tune.

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: GUEST,Jack Campin
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 02:17 PM

The name of the ship was the William O'T

Is somebody extracting the michael?

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 02:29 PM

Jack Campin wrote: Is somebody extracting the michael?

It does sound that way, but the name Billy of Tea is also problematic. The Australian National Dictionary cites only one use of "billy"-as-in-billycan prior to 1849 (although that one use was in New Zealand). The Otago whaling operation shut down in 1841.

There is no time for a Weller Brothers to have had a ship called the Billy of Tea. It's an anachronism.

Not the biggest problem with the song, to be sure, but if one is going to claim the song as from the Weller Brothers era, it's something that has to be explained.

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: GUEST,CJB666
Date: 21 Oct 25 - 02:29 PM

The YouTube links in Michael’s blog post do not work, but all the other links do.