The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties
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Richard Runciman Terry >> The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties
The Shanty Book
Part I
Sailor Shanties
(Curwen Edition 6308)
Collected and Edited, with Pianoforte Accompaniment, by RICHARD
RUNCIMAN TERRY, with a Foreword by SIR WALTER RUNCIMAN, Bart.
LONDON
J. Curwen & Sons Ltd., 24 Berners Street, W. 1
Copyright, 1921, by J. Curwen & Sons Ltd.
FOREWORD
By SIR WALTER RUNCIMAN
It is sometimes difficult for old sailors like myself to realize that
these fine shanty tunes--so fascinating to the musician, and which no
sailor can hear without emotion--died out with the sailing vessel, and
now belong to a chapter of maritime history that is definitely closed.
They will never more be heard on the face of the waters, but it is
well that they should be preserved with reverent care, as befits a
legacy from the generation of seamen that came to an end with the
stately vessels they manned with such skill and resource.
In speech, the old-time 'shellback' was notoriously reticent--almost
inarticulate; but in song he found self-expression, and all the
romance and poetry of the sea are breathed into his shanties, where
simple childlike sentimentality alternates with the Rabelaisian humour
of the grown man. Whatever landsmen may think about shanty words--with
their cheerful inconsequence, or light-hearted coarseness--there can
be no two opinions about the tunes, which, as folk-music, are a
national asset.
I know, of course, that several shanty collections are in the market,
but as a sailor I am bound to say that only one--Capt. W.B. Whall's
'Sea Songs, Ships, and Shanties'--can be regarded as authoritative.
Only a portion of Capt. Whall's delightful book is devoted to
shanties, of which he prints the melodies only (without
accompaniment); and of these he does not profess to give more than
those he himself learnt at sea. I am glad, therefore, to welcome
Messrs. Curwen's project of a wide and representative collection. Dr.
Terry's qualifications as editor are exceptional, since he was reared
in an environment of nineteenth-century seamen, and is the only
landsman I have met who is able to render shanties as the old seamen
did. I am not musician enough to criticize his pianoforte
accompaniments, but I can vouch for the authenticity of the _melodies_
as he presents them, untampered with in any way.
WALTER RUNCIMAN.
_Shoreston Hall_,
_Chathill_, 1921.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD by Sir Walter Runciman iii
INTRODUCTION v
NOTES ON THE SHANTIES xiii
WINDLASS & CAPSTAN SHANTIES:
1 Billy Boy 2
2 Bound for the Rio Grande 4
3 Good-bye, fare ye well 6
4 Johnny come down to Hilo 8
5 Clear the track, let the Bullgine run 10
6 Lowlands away 12
7 Sally Brown 16
8 Santy Anna 18
9 Shenandoah 20
10 Stormalong John 22
11 The Hog's-eye Man 24
12 The Wild Goose Shanty 26
13 We're all bound to go 28
14 What shall we do with the drunken sailor? 30
HALLIARD SHANTIES:
15 Blow, my bully boys 32
16 Blow the man down 34
17 Cheer'ly, men 36
18 Good morning, ladies all 38
19 Hanging Johnny 40
20 Hilo Somebody 42
21 Oh run, let the Bullgine run 44
22 Reuben Ranzo 46
23 The Dead Horse 48
24 Tom's gone to Hilo 50
25 Whisky Johnny 52
26 Boney was a warrior 54
FORE-SHEET OR SWEATING-UP SHANTIES:
27 Johnny Boker 55
28 Haul away, Joe 56
29 We'll haul the bowlin' 58
BUNT SHANTY:
30 Paddy Doyle's boots 59
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF SHANTIES
PAGE
Billy Boy 2
Blow, my bully boys 32
Blow the man down 34
Boney was a warrior 54
Bound for the Rio Grande 4
Cheer'ly, men 36
Clear the track, let the Bullgine run 10
Dead Horse, The 48
Good-bye, fare ye well 6
Good morning, ladies all 38
Hanging Johnny 40
Haul away, Joe 56
Hilo Somebody 42
Hog's-eye Man, The 24
Johnny Boker 55
Johnny come down to Hilo 8
Lowlands away 12
Oh run, let the Bullgine run 44
Paddy Doyle's boots 59
Reuben Ranzo 46
Sally Brown 16
Santy Anna 18
Shenandoah 20
Stormalong John 22
Tom's gone to Hilo 50
We'll haul the bowlin' 58
We're all bound to go 28
What shall we do with the drunken sailor? 30
Whisky Johnny 52
Wild Goose Shanty, The 26
INTRODUCTION
APOLOGIA
It may reasonably be asked by what authority a mere landsman publishes
a book on a nautical subject. I may, therefore, plead in extenuation
that I have all my life been closely connected with seafaring matters,
especially during childhood and youth, and have literally 'grown up
with' shanties. My maternal ancestors followed the sea as far back as
the family history can be traced, and sailor uncles and grand-uncles
have sung shanties to me from my childhood upwards. During boyhood I
was constantly about amongst ships, and had learnt at first hand all
the popular shanties before any collection of them appeared in print.
I have in later years collected them from all manner of sailors,
chiefly at Northumbrian sources. I have collated these later versions
with those which I learnt at first hand as a boy from sailor
relatives, and also aboard ship. And lastly, I lived for some years in
the West Indies, one of the few remaining spots where shanties may
still be heard, where my chief recreation was cruising round the
islands in my little ketch. In addition to hearing them in West Indian
seaports, aboard Yankee sailing ships and sugar droghers, I also heard
them sung constantly on shore in Antigua under rather curious
conditions. West Indian negro shanties are movable wooden huts, and
when a family wishes to change its _venue_ it does so in the following
manner: The shanty is levered up on to a low platform on wheels, to
which two very long ropes are attached. The ropes are manned by as
many hands as their length will admit. A 'shantyman' mounts the roof
of the hut and sits astride it. He sings a song which has a chorus,
and is an exact musical parallel of a seaman's 'pull-and-haul' shanty.
The crowd below sings the chorus, giving a pull on the rope at the
required points in the music, just as sailors did when hauling at sea.
Each pull on the rope draws the hut a short distance forward, and the
process is continued till its final resting-place is reached, when the
shantyman descends from the roof. The hut is then levered off the
platform on to _terra firma_ and fixed in its required position.
WHAT A SHANTY IS
Shanties were labour songs sung by sailors of the merchant service
only while at work, and never by way of recreation. Moreover--at
least, in the nineteenth century--they were never used aboard
men-o'-war, where all orders were carried out in silence to the pipe
of the bo'sun's whistle.
Before the days of factories and machinery, all forms of work were
literally _manual_ labour, and all the world over the labourer,
obeying a primitive instinct, sang at his toil: the harvester with his
sickle, the weaver at the loom, the spinner at the wheel. Long after
machinery had driven the labour-song from the land it survived at sea
in the form of shanties, since all work aboard a sailing vessel was
performed by hand.
The advent of screw steamers sounded the death-knell of the shanty.
Aboard the steamer there were practically no sails to be manipulated;
the donkey-engine and steam winch supplanted the hand-worked windlass
and capstan. By the end of the seventies steam had driven the sailing
ship from the seas. A number of sailing vessels lingered on through
the eighties, but they retained little of the corporate pride and
splendour that was once theirs. The old spirit was gone never to
return.
When the sailing ship ruled the waters and the shanty was a living
thing no one appears to have paid heed to it. To the landsman of those
days--before folk-song hunting had begun--the haunting beauty of the
tunes would appear to have made no appeal. This may be partly
accounted for by the fact that he would never be likely to hear the
sailor sing them ashore, and partly because of the Rabelaisian
character of the words to which they were sung aboard ship. We had
very prim notions of propriety in those days, and were apt to overlook
the beauty of the melodies, and to speak of shanties in bulk as 'low
vulgar songs.' Be that as it may, it was not until the late
eighties--when the shanty was beginning to die out with the sailing
ship--that any attempt was made to form a collection.
ORIGIN OF THE WORD
Here let me enter my protest against the literary preciosity which
derives the word from (_un_) _chante_ and spells it 'chanty'--in other
words, against the gratuitous assumption that unlettered British
sailors derived one of the commonest words in their vocabulary from a
foreign source. The result of this 'literary' spelling is that
ninety-nine landsmen out of every hundred, instead of pronouncing the
word 'shanty,' rhyming with 'scanty' (_as every sailor did_),
pronounce it 'tchahnty,' rhyming with 'auntie,' thereby courting the
amusement or contempt of every seaman. The vogue of '_ch_anty' was
apparently created by the late W.E. Henley, a fine poet, a great man
of letters, a profound admirer of shanty tunes, but entirely
unacquainted with nautical affairs. Kipling and other landsmen have
given additional currency to the spelling. The 'literary' sailors,
Clark Russell and Frank Bullen, have also spelt it '_ch_anty,' but
their reason is obvious. The modest seaman always bowed before the
landsman's presumed superiority in 'book-larnin'.' What more natural
than that Russell and Bullen, obsessed by so ancient a tradition,
should accept uncritically the landsman's spelling. But educated
sailors devoid of 'literary' pretensions have always written the word
as it was pronounced. To my mind the strongest argument against the
literary landsman's derivation of the word is that the British sailor
cultivated the supremest contempt for everything French, and would be
the last person to label such a definitely British practice as
shanty-singing with a French title. If there had been such a thing in
French ships as a labour-song bearing such a far-fetched title as
(_un_) _chante_, there might have been a remote possibility of the
British sailor adopting the French term in a spirit of sport or
derision, but there is no evidence that any such practice, or any such
term, achieved any vogue in French ships. As a matter of fact, the
Oxford Dictionary (which prints it '_sh_anty') states that the word
never found its way into print until 1869.
The truth is that, however plausible the French derivation theory may
sound, it is after all pure speculation--and a landsman's speculation
at that--unsupported by a shred of concrete evidence.
If I wished to advance another theory more plausible still, and
equally unconvincing, I might urge that the word was derived from the
negro hut-removals already mentioned. Here, at least, we have a very
ancient custom, which would be familiar to British seamen visiting
West Indian seaports. The object moved was a _shanty_; the music
accompanying the operation was called, by the negroes, a _shanty_
tune; its musical form (solo and chorus) was identical with the sailor
_shanty_; the pulls on the rope followed the same method which
obtained at sea; the soloist was called a _shanty_man; like the
shantyman at sea he did no work, but merely extemporized verses to
which the workers at the ropes supplied the chorus; and finally, the
negroes still pronounce the word itself exactly as the seaman did.
I am quite aware of the flaws in the above argument, but at least it
shows a manual labour act performed both afloat and ashore under
precisely similar conditions as to (_a_) its nature, (_b_) its musical
setting; called by the same name, _with the same pronunciation_ in
each case; and lastly, connected, in one case, with an actual hut or
_shanty_. Against this concrete argument we have a landsman's abstract
speculation, which (_a_) begs the whole question, and (_b_) which was
never heard of until a few years before the disappearance of the
sailing ship. I do not assert that the negroid derivation is
conclusive, but that from (_un_) _chante_ will not bear serious
inspection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The material under this head is very scanty. Nothing of any
consequence was written before the eighties, when W.L. Alden, in
_Harper's Magazine_, and James Runciman, in the _St. James's Gazette_
and other papers, wrote articles on the subject with musical
quotations. Since then several collections have appeared:
1887. _Sailors' Songs or Chanties_, the words by Frederick
J. Davis, R.N.R., the music composed and arranged upon
traditional sailor airs by Ferris Tozer, Mus. D. Oxon.
1888. _The Music of the Waters_, by Laura Alexandrine Smith.
1910 and 1912. _Sea Songs, Ships, and Shanties_, by Capt.
W.B. Whall.
1912. _Songs of Sea Labour_, by Frank T. Bullen and W.F.
Arnold.
1914. _English Folk Chanteys_ with Pianoforte Accompaniment,
collected by Cecil J. Sharp.
Of all these collections Capt. Whall's is the only one which a sailor
could accept as authoritative. Capt. Whall unfortunately only gives
the twenty-eight shanties which he himself learnt at sea. But to any
one who has heard them sung aboard the old sailing ships, his versions
ring true, and have a bite and a snap that is lacking in those
published by mere collectors.
Davis and Tozer's book has had a great vogue, as it was for many years
the only one on the market. But the statement that the music is
'composed and arranged on traditional sailor airs' rules it out of
court in the eyes of seamen, since (_a_) a sailor song is not a
shanty, and (_b_) to 'compose and arrange on traditional airs' is to
destroy the traditional form.
Miss Smith's book is a thick volume into which was tumbled
indiscriminately and uncritically a collection of all sorts of tunes
from all sorts of countries which had any connection with seas, lakes,
rivers, or their geographical equivalents. Scientific folk-song
collecting was not understood in those days, and consequently all was
fish that came to the authoress's net. Sailor shanties and landsmen's
nautical effusions were jumbled together higgledy-piggledy, along with
'Full Fathom Five' and the 'Eton Boating Song.' But this lack of
discrimination, pardonable in those days, was not so serious as the
inability to write the tunes down correctly. So long as they were
copied from other song-books they were not so bad, but when it came to
taking them down from the seamen's singing the results were
deplorable. Had the authoress been able to give us correct versions of
the shanties her collection would have been a valuable one. The book
contains altogether about thirty-two shanties collected from sailors
in the Tyne seaports. Since both Miss Smith and myself hail from
Newcastle, her 'hunting ground' for shanties was also mine, and I am
consequently in a position to assess the importance or unimportance of
her work. I may, therefore, say that although hardly a single shanty
is noted down correctly, I can see clearly--having myself noted the
same tunes in the same district--what she intended to convey, and
furthermore can vouch for the accuracy of some of the words which were
common to north country sailors, and which have not appeared in other
collections.
If I have been obliged to criticize Miss Smith's book it is not
because I wish to disparage a well-intentioned effort, but because I
constantly hear _The Music of the Waters_ quoted as an authoritative
work on sailor shanties; and since the shanties in it were all
collected in the district where I spent boyhood and youth, I am
familiar with all of them, and can state definitely that they are in
no sense authoritative. I should like, however, to pay my tribute of
respect to Miss Smith's industry, and to her enterprise in calling
attention to tunes that then seemed in a fair way to disappear.
Bullen and Arnold's book ought to have been a valuable contribution to
shanty literature, as Bullen certainly knew his shanties, and used to
sing them capitally. Unfortunately his musical collaborator does not
appear to have been gifted with the faculty of taking down authentic
versions from his singing. He seems to have had difficulty in
differentiating between long measured notes and unmeasured pauses;
between the respective meanings of three-four and six-eight time;
between modal and modern tunes; and between the cases where irregular
barring was or was not required. Apart from the amateur nature of the
harmonies, the book exhibits such strange unacquaintance with the
rudiments of musical notation as the following (p. 25):
[Music illustration]
A few other collections deserve mention:
1912. _The Esperance Morris Book_, Part II (Curwen Edition
8571), contains five shanties collected and arranged by
Clive Carey.
1914. _Shanties and Forebitters_, collected and
accompaniments written by Mrs. Clifford Beckett (Curwen
Edition 6293).
_Journal of the Folk-Song Society_, Nos. 12, 18, and 20,
contain articles on shanties, with musical examples
(melodies only), which, from the academic point of view, are
not without interest.
1920. _The Motherland Song Book_ (Vols. III and IV, edited
by R. Vaughan Williams) contains seven shanties. It is
worthy of note that Dr. Vaughan Williams, Mr. Clive Carey,
and Mrs. Clifford Beckett all spell the word 'shanty' as
sailors pronounced it.
1920. _Sailor Shanties arranged for Solo and Chorus of Men's
Voices_ by the present editor; two selections (Curwen
Edition 50571 and 50572).
There are one or two other collections in print which are obviously
compilations, showing no original research. Of these I make no note.
SHANTY FORMS
Shanties may be roughly divided, as regards their use, into two
classes: (_a_) Hauling shanties, and (_b_) Windlass and Capstan. The
former class accompanied the setting of the sails, and the latter the
weighing of the anchor, or 'warping her in' to the wharf, etc. Capstan
shanties were also used for pumping ship. A few shanties were
'interchangeable,' i.e. they were used for both halliards and capstan.
The subdivisions of each class are interesting, and the nature of the
work involving 'walk away,' 'stamp and go,' 'sweating her up,' 'hand
over hand,' and other types of shanty would make good reading; but
nautical details, however fascinating, must be economized in a musical
publication.
Capstan shanties are readily distinguishable by their music. The
operation of walking round the capstan (pushing the capstan bars in
front of them) was continuous and not intermittent. Both tune and
chorus were, as a rule, longer than those of the hauling shanty, and
there was much greater variety of rhythm. Popular songs, if they had a
chorus or refrain, could be, and were, effectively employed for
windlass and capstan work.
Hauling shanties were usually shorter than capstan ones, and are of
two types: (_a_) those used for 'the long hoist' and (_b_) those
required for 'the short pull' or 'sweating-up.' Americans called these
operations the 'long' and the 'short drag.' The former was used when
beginning to hoist sails, when the gear would naturally be slack and
moderately easy to manipulate. It had two short choruses, with a
double pull in each. In the following example, the pulls are marked
[music accent symbol].
[Music illustration: REUBEN RANZO
SOLO. Oh pity poor Reuben Ranzo,
CHORUS. [accent] Ranzo, boys, [accent] Ranzo,
SOLO. Oh poor old Reuben Ranzo,
CHORUS. [accent] Ranzo, boys, [accent] Ranzo.]
It is easy to see how effective a collective pull at each of these
points would be, while the short intervals of solo would give time for
shifting the hands on the rope and making ready for the next combined
effort.
When the sail was fully hoisted and the gear taut, a much stronger
pull was necessary in order to make everything fast, so the shanty was
then changed for a 'sweating-up' one, in which there was only one
short chorus and one very strong pull:
[Music illustration: HAUL THE BOWLIN'
SOLO: We'll haul the bowlin', so early in the morning,
CHORUS: We'll haul the bowlin', the bowlin' [accent] haul.]
So much effort was now required on the pull that it was difficult to
sing a musical note at that point. The last word was therefore usually
shouted.
SOURCES OF TUNES
The sailor travelled in many lands, and in his shanties there are
distinct traces of the nationalities of the countries he visited.
Without doubt a number of them came from American negro sources. The
songs heard on Venetian gondolas must have had their effect, as many
examples show. There are also distinct traces of folk-songs which the
sailor would have learnt ashore in his native fishing village, and the
more familiar Christy Minstrel song was frequently pressed into the
service. As an old sailor once said to me: 'You can make anything into
a shanty.'
Like all traditional tunes, some shanties are in the ancient modes,
and others in the modern major and minor keys. It is the habit of the
'folk-songer' (I am not alluding to our recognized folk-song experts)
to find 'modes' in every traditional tune. It will suffice, therefore,
to say that shanties follow the course of all other traditional music.
Many are modern, and easily recognizable as such. Others are modal in
character, such as 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?' No. 14,
and 'The Hog's-Eye Man,' No. 11. Others fulfil to a certain extent
modal conditions, but are nevertheless in keys, e.g. 'Stormalong
John,' No. 10.
Like many other folk-songs, certain shanties--originally, no doubt, in
a mode--were, by the insertion of leading notes, converted into the
minor key. There was also the tendency on the part of the modern
sailor to turn his minor key into a major one. I sometimes find
sailors singing in the major, nowadays, tunes which the very old men
of my boyhood used to sing in the minor. A case in point is 'Haul
away, Joe,' No. 28. Miss Smith is correct in giving it in the minor
form which once obtained on the Tyne, and I am inclined to hazard the
opinion that that was the original form and not, as now, the
following:
[Music illustration:
Way, haul away,
We'll haul away the bowlin'.
Way, haul away,
We'll haul away, Joe.]
In later times I have also heard 'The Drunken Sailor' (a distinctly
modal tune) sung in the major as follows:
[Music illustration:
What shall we do with the drunken sailor?
What shall we do with the drunken sailor? etc.]
I have generally found that these perversions of the tunes are due to
sailors who took to the sea as young men in the last days of the
sailing ship, and consequently did not imbibe to the full the old
traditions. With the intolerance of youth they assumed that the modal
turn given to a shanty by the older sailor was the mark of ignorance,
since it did not square with their ideas of a major or minor key. This
experience is common to all folk-tune collectors.
Other characteristics, for example: (_a_) different words to the same
melody; (_b_) different melodies to the same or similar words, need
not be enlarged upon here, as they will be self-evident when a
definitive collection is published.