Subject: RE: Stan Hugill - the real words?
From:
GUEST,Robin in Sydney
Date: 07 Sep 06 - 11:51 PM
I'm the "friend" Sandra in Sydney referred to. I began singing sea songs in Australia in the sixties, and was told then that Stan had sent unexpurgated versions of his songs to Legman. He did, Legman refers to it in his book on erotic folklore "The Horn Book," (p263) but doesn't say what he intended to do with them. We also were told that when Stan originally bowdlerised his recorded words, he replaced the "dirty " ones with rhymes, so that you could unpick an original version with a bit of thought. As a result, I've been singing (with Fo'c'sle till 1985 and with The Roaring Forties since 1988) a version of "A'rovin" that I recreated. To judge from the version of Stan's that JWB posted, I got it fairly right.
If my memory is correct, Stan also refers to the sailor's habit of singing bawdy versions of shanties when on cargo ships (no passengers to offend,) and says that the notorious "Sally Brown" verses fit to the tune of "Shenandoah." Which they do, so I've sung that as well.
Oh, Sally Brown, she's willing and able
Away, you rolling river
On the for'ard hatch, or the captain's table
And away, I'm bound to go, cross the wide Missouri
There's a couple of threads underlying all this.
1)Do we want to sing bawdy shanties? Yes, I do, I find the bowdlerised versions artificial and coy. The originals feel more genuine, the bawdiness is almost innocent by modern standards, and some of it is bloody funny. I wish I'd written this, from "The Ebenezer,"
The Bread was a hard as any brass
And the beef was salt as Lot's wife's arse.
"Cruising round Yarmouth" admittedly not a shanty, has many genuinely funny ship parts metaphors, particularly the line which appears to be translated from the latin writings of the sexually disturbed St Paul.
2) How good is some of the stuff we rewrite to try and rediscover the originals? See the verse to Shenandoah above. Some of the stuff we rewrite is not as real or as good as we like to think. "Unexpurgated Sailor Songs" is more like a rugger club song book in places. Old singers whether genuine old shantymen, old revivalists like me, or more recent singers, get sets of words from other singers as often as versions from recorded texts. As a result, a fair few of us are singing modern additions like some of the verses of "The Hog's eye man," along with originals. Is this "the folk process?"
I don't think this matters too much, after all, shanties very rarely seem to have fully set words, they varied with every performance. However, in order to prevent the gradual watering down of originals by the repeated variations of later singers, we should refer to the originals occasionally. So, yes, we need them.
There's a Ph. D. project here. Collect what originals we have, and set them out with later versions and rewrites also ackowledged as such. Please, someone? (else)
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sj
