Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: GUEST,Little Robyn
Date: 12 Feb 26 - 09:49 PM

So we're not really any closer to finding the true origin of the song, apart from Mike's post and I am aware that Neil Colquhoun had a lot to do with discovering (writing) a lot of NZ's 'traditional' folk songs. Many years ago (about 1965) I bought a couple of the NZ Song Spinners records, one of them being Songs of the Whalers. No, the Wellerman song isn't on it but the blurb on the back is interesting. I believe they recorded it in 1959 or 1961 and by 1965 I think the group had disbanded. It's a Kiwi records EP - M31-1, put out by AH and AW Reed. It says "The four women and six men who form the Song Spinners group function as a 'workshop of song' each contributing ideas for the arrangement and presentation of the songs of early New Zealand in which they have a strong collective interest."
The members of the group were: Audria Beddie, Sybil Hewitson, Lorna McLeod, Barbie Colquhoun, Jack Murphy, Mathew Davies, Don Yeates, John Godden, Paul Gillet, Trevor Tasker, Neil Colquhoun and.......Arthur WELLER. I don't know if he was related to the Weller brothers or if they just researched NZ history and found the name.   
I wonder if they found any of the above sources and tried to work on them? But it wasn't until later that Neil put more work into it and put it all together?
Robyn

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 13 Feb 26 - 04:20 AM

Little.Robyn wrote: I wonder if they found any of the above sources and tried to work on them?

I find it interesting that the Reeds published the LPs. I hadn't known they were into recordings. They certainly published a lot of books. FWIW, I did such research as I could, from Minnesota, on Reed books. Which include (dum de DUM dum)... the second edition of Song of a Young Country. (Not the third.) The book mentions three Song Spinners EPs on the back, and it cites those recordings for at least some songs (e.g. "Across the Line" says it was recorded by the Song Spinners). But Song of a Young Country does not cite any Reed works or other sources for "Wellerman."

Moreover, I went to great lengths to try to pick up any Reed publications that might be relevant. I looked over Otakou, Early Days in and About Otago Harbour by Hannah M. Chapman-Cohen, The Story of Otago: Age of Adventure by Alfred Hamish Reed, and The Story of New Zealand by A. H. Reed.

Nothing.

All our evidence is negative, I agree. But I think the sheer weight of negative evidence is sufficient that we can say that "Wellerman," while perhaps based on some old fragments, has a lot of Colquhoun and Wood in it.

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: GUEST,Little Robyn
Date: 13 Feb 26 - 02:57 PM

I'm sure you're right Robert.
Reeds used to be distributers of Folkways Records in NZ in the mid 1950s, as well as Kiwi records. One of the oldest ones listed on Discogs.com was dated 1957, a tutorial on how to play cornet. They produced several 7inch records of Folk Dances for use in schools and I'm sure that's what our music teacher was using in 1959. Another early record was 'Sings Harry', a song cycle by Douglas Lilburn.
Their 'shop' was like a warehouse - books stacked up all around the room which was on the 8th floor of a big old building on the corner of Wakefield and Taranaki streets, To get there you had to either walk up 7 flights of stairs or trust their old cage-like lift that went slowly up to the top - a very scary experience because you could see every floor through the bars of the cage as you went. I first bought the Folkways 'Pete Seeger's Guitar Guide' from there in 1963 and also many of the Folkways 10 inch records of children's songs. At the time they were about the only place in Wellington that sold American Folk music records until a few years later when Vanguard started appearing in regular music shops.
Robyn

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 13 Feb 26 - 03:22 PM

Little Robyn wrote: At the time they were about the only place in Wellington that sold American Folk music records until a few years later when Vanguard started appearing in regular music shops.

Interesting. Sounds like a fun place. And they were certainly popularizers -- of all sorts of things. :-)

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: JimLucas
Date: 17 Feb 26 - 04:03 PM

@ Robert B. Waltz: "It is almost certain that no one, in the Weller Brothers period, would have named a ship the 'Billy of Tea,' because the name wouldn't mean anything. Of course the ship's name could have changed in oral tradition, but its use in a song about the Wellers is an anachronism."

And not a deliberate joke?

Reading the rest of this thread, I wonder... Can I really be (almost) the only one who suspects that this song (poem?) was never meant to be entirely factual, but a deliberately humorous parody, with its shore-based whalers experiencing an impossible "Nantucket sleigh ride" and a ship with a name that means "pot of tea"?

I find it hard to imagine that the author was uniquely lacking in a sense of humor.

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 17 Feb 26 - 06:36 PM

JimLucas wrote: Can I really be (almost) the only one who suspects that this song (poem?) was never meant to be entirely factual,

Of course the song is not factual. How could a whale pull a boat for forty days, or even forty hours? And whales generally pulled a ship's boats, not the whole ship! It's a tall tale, and tall tales are obviously intended to entertain, and always have been. (And are prone to be misinterpreted by humorless people -- witness the tall tale of Samson: 2500+ years old, and a lot of Christians and Jews mistake it for history and fail to see that it's one of the earliest knucklehead jokes.)

But the origin of a song, and its purpose, are entirely different. And jokes tend to be better when one understands them. A joke about the Weller Brothers makes more sense at a time when people remember the Weller Brothers. And yet, a ship named the Billy of Tea wouldn't make much sense in the Weller period. So there are oddities about the origin of the song even at a very quick glance.

All by themselves, that combination of anachronisms hint that the song is a fake. But they don't prove it. Someone seeking the origin of the song (and that's the title of the thread) doesn't need to know that the song is a joke, or even to have a sense of humor; the person merely needs data. Which we are trying to find.

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Little Robyn
Date: 17 Feb 26 - 07:24 PM

I strongly suspect that the Song Spinners (NZ not Liverpool) including Arthur Weller and Neil Colquhoun, looking for some whaling songs suitable for school children, found a selection of tall tales and songs - Richard Chase's book and Burl Ives songs were available in NZ in the 1950s, and they include silly songs that kids love. If the group functioned as a 'workshop of song', each contributing ideas for the arrangement and presentation of the songs, as the record states, I can imagine them finding the NZ Weller family story and then looking for a song to adapt and turn into a 'NZ Folksong". They never recorded it - maybe they didn't finish their song and it took Colquhoun a few years more to work it out to an acceptable level. Maybe others helped him in the 1960s, after the group disbanded.
The New Zealand Folklore Society never found it in 1969, when we sent Phil Garland on a hunt for the 'great NZ Folksong' and he travelled all around the South Island looking for songs. Mostly he found poems.
Robyn

Subject: RE: Origin: Soon May the Wellerman Come
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 17 Feb 26 - 09:20 PM

Little Robyn wrote: The New Zealand Folklore Society never found it in 1969, when we sent Phil Garland on a hunt for the 'great NZ Folksong' and he travelled all around the South Island looking for songs. Mostly he found poems.

As is indeed evident from the contents of Shanties by the Way, which printed the outcome of a lot of those searches.

On the other hand, Garland's definition of "folk song" is not exactly what we would call a "traditional folk song," as is illustrated by Faces in the Firelight. From the outside, it feels as if no one in New Zealand in the 1960s quite knew what they were trying to do. In a very real way, it reminds me of what Percy and Ritson had done in Britain two centuries before, with Percy heavily retouching his stuff but at least putting it out there, while Ritson was a purist but not so much of a competent collector.