Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth

Subject: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: Mathew Raymond
Date: 05 Sep 13 - 10:00 PM

Great song

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: r.padgett
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 10:22 AM

It's full of double entendre and as such it very dirty!

Ray

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 10:41 AM

Frank Zappa loved it.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 11:44 AM

What? The song or the double entendre?

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 11:54 AM

The whole album. And if loved that, how could he not have loved the song?

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 12:19 PM

Album? What album? Stop confusing me. Cruising Round Yarmouth is a song, not an album. At least it was when Harry Cox recorded it for the BBC in 1953, and when Ewan MacColl recorded it for Tradition several years later.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: sciencegeek
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 12:19 PM

Indeed... both Blow Boys Blow and Leviathan by MacColl & LLoyd were not only great albums, but helped start new interest in sea music.

Jerry Garcia went so far as to cite both as his favorite albums - in the Grateful Dawg documentary. He sang Angeline on the show... I suspect because they wanted to get on television & past the censors. LOL

Funny... my mom had no problems with me singing all those songs, even though I was only 15 when we got the album. But heaven forbid I should use the word "ain't" or anything stronger than dang.... go figure.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 12:26 PM

CRY isn't on Leviathan. In fact, on all the occasions I heard Bert sing,I never heard him come out with that one.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 01:10 PM

Dozens of versions, incuding one called symolically 'The Fireship'.
First commercial version - somewhat cleaned up, entered the hit parade sung by Guy Mitchell in 1950 entitled 'One of the Roving Kind' - not a lot of people remember that!!
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: sciencegeek
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 01:26 PM

guest, FMcC

no... it's on the Blow Boys Blow album, 1966, an earlier album with Bert & Ewan than Leviathan. It's sung by Ewan on the album... quite effectively, I might add.

The point in my post was to let folks know about 2 really great collections of shanties done by 2 wonderful singers...

so let me add that both are available on CD.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: sciencegeek
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 01:46 PM

CRY isn't on Leviathan. In fact, on all the occasions I heard Bert sing,I never heard him come out with that one.

oooops... sorry, minor brain fart there... Ewan is on Thar She Blows, not Leviathan... don't think that has been reissued... if wrong, please let me know so I can grab one.

anyhow... on Blow Boys Blow you also get to hear Bert sing Do Me Ama & Wild Goose Shanty

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 01:48 PM

I've gathered every available example of the family to which this song belongs. Steve Gardham provided a few broadsides

As Jim says, there are dozens of texts, but they don't all belong to "the same song." What they have in common, however, is the meeting of the sailor and the streetwalker, the ensuing nautical double entendre, and a disagreeable outcome for Jack Tar.

The earliest such song dates from the late 1600s. The subgrouping that includes both "Cruising 'Round Yarmouth" and Stan Hugill's "Ratcliffe Highway" seems to have started about two centuries later, with related efforts in the meantime. It hung on in tradition in the English-speaking navies till after World War 2, and of course MacColl and Lloyd rejuvenated it for folkies, courtesy of both Sam Larner and Harry Cox.

Mudcat's Charley Noble reinvented once more a few years ago under the title "Widgery Wharf." (Hi, Charley!)

Hugill's "Ratcliffe Highway" in "Shanties from the Seven Seas" is not the bar-room contretemps usually recorded under this title. You can hear it right here from Gibb Sahib:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpfrPzBncBY

One day I hope to tell all, but my current plate runneth over with responsibility.

Meanwhile, anyone with interesting thoughts or anecdotes about any of these songs should post them here. You could become a footnote!

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 03:38 PM

"CRY"
I thought that was Johnnie Ray - but am I the only one old enough to remember that one as well?
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: sciencegeek
Date: 06 Sep 13 - 03:54 PM

"CRY"
I thought that was Johnnie Ray - but am I the only one old enough to remember that one as well?
Jim Carroll

LOL... somthing similar passed thru my mind, but had no idea who the singer was... contemporary music has never been a strength of mine.

I love performing Cruising Round Yarmouth, once I'm sure the audience is up for it.... if they do OK with Handsome Cabin Boy, there's hope.

It seems more like the 1950s at times and how quick some folks are to get offended. And yet the "uncensored" shanty workshops are always the ones packed to the rafters. And just do they expect from guys who have spent waaay too long at sea???

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 07 Sep 13 - 02:30 AM

"Mine neither - my "titles only" knowledge died out in the early sixtes, around the time the Beatles drove us out of the wonderful 'Cavern' Jazz Club in Liverpool, and later personally, me out of Liverpool altogether; if you weren't interested in them or football there was sod all else to hang around for.
Part of the ageing process seems to be that you start remembering words of songs you never knew - funny thing, life!.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: GUEST,Lighter
Date: 07 Sep 13 - 07:30 AM

> you start remembering words of songs you never knew.

Or imagining words of songs you did know:

"The animals came in cheek by jowl,
The gentle dove and the horny owl."

It popped in to my head the other day, but there's no way it could be in any version of "One more River" that I've ever met with.

Ought to be, of course.

Folk process: new words that pop into your head; see "chanteys."

Subject: RE: Tune Req: While Cruising Round Yarmouth
From: The Sandman
Date: 07 Sep 13 - 04:59 PM

funny thing, life!, thats life jim, but not as we know it,still much more funny than death