Subject: Stan Hugill's Performances
From:
Gibb Sahib
Date: 22 Jul 12 - 03:32 PM
The purpose of this thread is to gather, discuss, and analyse information about Stan Hugill's recordings and other performances.
Stan Hugill was, cumulatively, perhaps the most influential figure on the revival of shanties/chanties in the 2nd half of the twentieth century. While fellows like Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl were extremely influential on the singing of chanties within the broad Anglophone Folk Revival context, Hugill was especially influential in the more rarified genre/subgenre that he would help engender, "Sea Music."
Hugill did not exist in a vacuum, and his performance of sailor songs changed over time. In order to understand his work and influence, therefore, I believe one needs to understand where his performances were coming from. That is to say, it is not as if there was a full stock of traditional (orally transmitted, sung at sea) songs that got injected wholesale into Hugill by dint of his sea career and which he simply emitted "as is" for the rest of his life.
By the time Hugill had gone to sea, most of the significant works on chantying and chanty collections had already been published. A revival in chanty singing amongst land folk had started in the 1920s, and this was based in versions of chanties that had by then become quite homogenized and even standardized. The U.S. Merchant Marine had revived chanty singing as a pastime among its crews. London's Savage Club was a place where gentlemen gathered and sang chanties for leisure. Numerous chanty recordings were released in the 1920s. At the same time, practical chanty singing had largely died out at sea.
Hugill certainly learned a good amount of chanties in a practical context. But many more (how many?) were those he collected from individual singers while that was all going on, i.e. not necessarily stuff he'd sung. These two components made up priceless knowledge, and Hugill shared that in his 1961 work, Shanties from the Seven Seas. Again, however, chanties at that point were not a simple orally-transmitted tradition. Popular media versions were floating around. And by the time Hugill wrote his book he had consulted most of the major print sources that could be found. This led to a synthesis. With the exception of the really "rare" chanties that Hugill sang or collected in his day, most of the chanties in SfSS can be seen as some sort of combination of what Hugill may have heard at sea, heard on land, or read in books, plus his own creative license at the time of writing. There is also much in SfSS that Hugill never sang and never heard, either – stuff reproduced from other books. My understanding is that he could not read music well, and so he may not have had much idea of what some of these songs sounded like.
After the publication of SfSS, Hugill, in a way, entered the folk revival scene. He would become a performer, and like other performer, he was bound by certain constraints and conventions of the performance context. This influenced what he performed, to be sure, even after the writing of SfSS had expanded and changed his repertoire.
The development did not stop there, however. After becoming active in the Revival, Hugill was influenced by other renditions of the songs and/or was obligated to adopt them. It's difficult to swim upstream. Who nowadays, for example, could go to a singing session and try to sing "South Australia" in a form like it was originally documented while the Lloyd>Clancy Brothers version so saturates the air?
A great example of Hugill's change is the chanty of "John Cherokee." He presents an original form of it, that he collected, in SfSS. He recorded that on his first album (1962). Evidently, not many revival singers heard that album (did they?). At some point, a Revival version of "John Cherokee" was worked up, based in Joanna Colcord's collection (but misreading the notation a bit, to create a form that, IMO, is slightly uncharacteristic of an authentic chanty). Hugill's very different version of the song then disappears, and he himself goes on to record the Revival version.
All this is by way of introduction to what I hope to discuss in this thread – although anyone is welcome to discuss other things of broad relevance to the topic. I am interested in Hugill's actual performance repertoire (live and on recordings). I'm interested in how that repertoire relates to what he learned at sea, to what he included in his books, and to what other people were singing in the Revival. I'm interested in how those performances were "worked up" – including what "instructions" Hugill gave to others who were singing with him. (McGrath of Harlow had previously given some interesting info on this in a Mudcat thread; such personal anecdotes are of great interest.) And I am interested in how it all developed/changed over time.
I hope this provokes some interesting discussion.
Gibb Schreffler
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sj
