Subject: RE: Stories/Shanties of Hjalmar Rutzebeck
From:
Dustin Laurence
Date: 06 May 03 - 03:15 AM
I have that album, so at least two must have sold. :-) I have it on CD-R from Folkways, so yes you can get it that way.
I also have some of Hjalmar's books (several collected in one volume). I bought it for Mad Sea after listening to this album, but his outrageous Alaskan epic and tenure as Alaska's most wanted man (or something) is not to be missed. Do be aware that this is about as far from _Swallows and Amazons_ as you can get; Mad Sea has the distinction of being *by far* the most explicit of any book I own about the abuse boys could suffer at sea (the book claims in that edition Hjalmar had added details he couldn't write in the earlier incarnation). My other authors were either luckier, or more circumspect, or both.
About the recording--I might as well write a review, because I think it should be more widely known than it is. So here goes.
The first thing to know is that this isn't really an album of sea shanties. It is readings from Hjalmar's autobiographical _Mad Sea_, occasionally "illustrated" with Hjalmar's own versions of his shanties (mostly performed by Morrigan, with occasional verses by a very old-sounding Hjalmar) when they match the theme of the text. I would say it is more of a dramatized audio book than anything else. This isn't a bad thing, but you should know whether it is what you want to buy. If you just want a few songs to listen to or sing down at the local songfest, *don't buy this album* (at least not yet). But if you want to know more about life at sea, and/or you want to hear very different versions (of unknown "authenticity," whatever that means) of some well-known shanties, then this is definitely something you'll want to listen to.
The readings are great, though if one tracks down and buys Mad Sea they are admittedly redundant (I only knew about the books because of the album). They cover a good fraction of the high points of the book, though. The musical illustration often works well, too--I can't think of Hjalmar becalmed in the Sargasso without hearing "Go below, my Johnnies, go below" in my head, and I rarely hear "Leave Her, Johnny" without thinking of Hjalmar being sold out of jail and onto that ship.
On the musical side, I like the Morrigan performances, and enjoy listening to the tracks of Hjalmar himself though frankly by that time his voice is quite weak. Some are more convincing than others; I have no problem believing that his version of "Fire Down Below," for example, might be completely authentic (and all the more valuable for being completely different than the other versions I've heard), but as the text notes others are perhaps not so convincing (I suspect I'm simply incapable of singing "Sally Brown, you are a vampire" with a straight face, even if I do know the word didn't always apply exclusively to the Living Dead) and one really can't know how much is memory and how much invention. But for the proper audience for this album, that's an invitation and a challenge rather than a problem.
I do think a caveat is in order about the editing and production--there isn't any. Well, that's not really true, of course, but it listens more like a work in progress than a finished product. There really isn't anything to help you figure out what the album is about (initially I didn't realize it was readings from a published book), and it is occasionally hard to follow the story. This is especially true when the readings refer to events not excerpted on the album, which isn't rare. The extensive and informative notes offer some help but present new problems of their own (especially until you start noticing that the pages are not entirely in order, at least in my copy). The track breakdown is wholly inadequate; many places you can quite clearly hear a natural breakpoint (likely as not a new reader picks up an entirely different part of Hjalmar's life) and hear the the track change, but it's all lumped together. This is presumably an artifact of the CDs being made directly from the original analog recording without remastering, but quite annoying since this is an album that invites you to come back to bits of it later. The upshot is that you have no idea where the songs are or even how many there are. I solved this by recording the location of every song or song fragment on a piece of paper, and if this is such a great problem for you then this album probably wasn't what you wanted anyway.
If after those comments you still are interested in the album, then you will probably like it very much indeed. In that case, I have only two further pieces of advice: Bookfinder and ABE Books (you'll probably be wanting to put the bibliography to good use, and AFAIK it's all out of print). If you ever find a copy of his printed shanties, let me know without delay! (William, how many beers would I have to buy you at the next Dana Point festival to earn a copy of yours?)
Dustin, who hopes William won't drive too hard a bargain
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sj
