Boxing the Compass: A Century and a Half of Discourse About Sailors’ Chanties (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mystic Seaport Music of the Sea Symposium, 2015
Introduction: An Uneventful Voyage In the summer of 2014, the Charles W. Morgan sailed for the first time in over 80 years, as part of a public education project dubbed The 38 th Voyage. This much-publicized event, consisting of seven weeks of visits to New England ports, excited the interest of individuals seeking to understand and experience the life and operations aboard a mid-19 th century square-rigged sailing vessel. 1 For myself, and no doubt for other scholars and performers of 19 th century chanty songs, the restoration and relaunch of the Morgan presented the exciting prospect of a laboratory in which to find answers to questions of chanty-singing practice. The 1841 barque Morgan was built within a few years of the very advent of the chanty genre to sailing vessels. Yet during the Morgan's 38 th Voyage a program of working to chanties was not implemented, and only a couple times were a few participants able to work to a chanty. 2 While several of the guest "Voyagers" and auxiliary crewmembers were keen to use chanties, for the most part the professional crew was either uninterested in or unfamiliar with the practice of chanties and the vessel's captain effectively prohibited their use. 3 As I followed these events while in residence at Mystic Seaport's Munson Institute (of American Maritime Studies) that summer, the first question raised for me as an historian of chanties was not one I had expected I'd be asking. This was the question of how, if chanties had ever been considered important to the operation of such vessels, the Morgan could be sailed without them. The simple answer was that, indeed, for practical purposes the singing of chanties is in no way essential. 4 This seemingly obvious conclusion caused me to rethink common narratives of the history of chanties, so far as
Society for Ethnomusicology, 2015
INTRO: The work-song genre chanty is currently most associated with the culture of Anglophone sailing vessels-an association which in turn provides the general frame of reference in which it is typically presented and discussed. As a result, the genre is popularly viewed as if it were, like romantic visions of "the sea" that accompany it, timeless and exceptional. In contrast to such a view, the ideas presented in this paper aim to historicize the genre, and, by discarding the conventional frame of reference, to resituate it as a branch of a larger body of song practices connected with dry land and inland waters. In doing this I seek to advance a narrative of the genre's development in contradistinction to standing narratives, the latter which treat the genre either as rooted in pre-modern European traditions or as an indeterminately composed, unique synthesis of traditions of many diverse ethnic groups on the sea. A progenitor of the first sort of narrative was the English folklorist Cecil Sharp, who was working in the early twentieth century-some decades after the initial decline of chanty-singing in wind-driven vessels. Sharp treated chanties as representative of a hoary and yet disappearing ethnic heritage of English "folk" song. A few decades earlier, contemporary commenters noted a similarity between sailors' chanties and African-American songs generally. 1 However, Sharp, who had not done any historical research and who interviewed only White men from Britain, regarded the idea of African-American influence on chanties as questionable. 2 Discussants since the time of Sharp's generation have tended to be more generous in This is an unpublished conference paper ©Gibb Schreffler. The ideas herein may appear in more developed form in later publications.
Chanteys are Not Pirate Drinking Songs
Whenever I present a part of my project, I always have a sneaking suspicion that my research draws interest and crowds solely because people often align sea chanteys (or sea songs) with pirates (or dirty drinking ditties). This suspicion is often confirmed when my project comes up in conversation, either general or scholarly, because I am inevitably asked how my project on pirates is going or how much fun my research must be considering that I get to talk about pirates. I cannot lay fault or blame at the feet of the people attending my presentations or with those who are asking me questions about my topic of choice (I will expound further on that in later parts of this discussion), but I have found that, as my research has progressed, I have begun to bristle a bit when I am confronted by the alignment of sea chanteys with pirates. I would like to begin by outlining how and why sea chanteys are often aligned with pirates, though not really connected (nor should they ever be) and will finish up by discussing why sea chanteys were primarily the purview of hard-working tars who were attempting to navigate the difficult economic, social, and hierarchical world of their specific maritime environment. It is my intention that this post will eventually become a much larger, published analysis and argument. I am interested in feedback concerning these preliminary thoughts.
Despite the attention of a number of scholars over the last half-century, the origins and early history of the chantry remain obscure. The following paper considers several examples of early medieval commemorative practice which may have been significant in the development of the chantry, and concludes with an attempt to establish something of an institutional, liturgical and architectural context for the medieval chantry as it found expression in later medieval England and Wales.1 MOST popular accounts of the monumental legacy of the English medieval chantry tend to identify it with small-scale forms: chapels attached to parish churches, tiny bolton annexes set outside the aisles of larger churches, or exquisite cage-like structures englobed within the larger space of a host institution.2 These enclosures, and the constitutional arrangements that caused them to be made, variously came into being in the 13th and 14th centuries, but they were only one set of responses to the religious impulses that underlie chantries and they should be set alongside a number of much larger, socially useful foundations -like academic colleges, almshouses and hospitalswhich often also had chantry functions.3
Introduction: Shipboard Literary Cultures and the Stain of the Sea
Shipboard Literary Practices: Reading, Writing and Performing at Sea, 2021
The introduction to the edited volume outlines the topics covered by the essays that follow and places them within historical and academic contexts. Turning for examples to several literary and non-literary texts, most notably the 1820s diaries of Edward Beck and Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), it considers the differences and the continuities that prevail in shipboard environments across time, while also discussing the ways in which the human experience of time itself is complicated by seafaring. Particular attention is paid to the role of literary practices in shaping the experience of seafaring—to how such practices construct and reshape shipboard hierarchies, and also to how they help seafarers come to terms with the shipboard environment and with the ocean itself. While thus shaping shipboard cultures, the introduction argues, literary practices are also themselves affected—or ‘stained’—by the ocean environment.
Twentieth Century Editors and the Re-envisioning of Chanties: A Case Study of "Lowlands [Away]"
Mystic Music of the Sea Symposium, 2012
INTRO: This paper critiques the presentations of 20 th century editors to illustrate their influence on perceptions of the origins, cultural affiliations, and content of chanties. I begin with the observation that 19 th century writers-the contemporaries of living practice-emphasized cultural origins in America, including African-American song traditions and popular minstrel music. I then explain how Anglocentric writers of the early 20 th century often perceived, and so began to present, chanties as representative of an older body of British folklore. This at times led them to emphasize existing, or to manufacture non-existing, British features of the repertoire. Replete with elegant yet speculative song histories, these editors' works became the go-to references during revivals of chanty-singing amongst laypersons; their reproduction through performance and subsequent, derivative publications created a dense layering of discourse that would obscure earlier visions of the genre. The revivalists of the Folk movement, being largely White and often Anglocentric, located value in chanties on the basis of their supposed great age, folkloric (i.e. as opposed to popular) qualities, and relation to British ethnic traditions-features which by then appeared to be well-established in the presentations of chanties as envisioned by imaginative editors. In order to demonstrate how the process of re-envisioning occurred, I look in detail at the development of one chanty in particular, "Lowlands." The formative context of chanties The specific variety of work-song known as chanty was almost certainly born in the Americas with much of its essential form and foundational repertoire contributed from African-American music. Although time does not permit me to present the large body of evidence to support this claim, 1 I will note that much comes in the eyewitness accounts of African-Americans singing at work and play. 2 The contexts for singing similar songs included rowing boats on rivers, corn-shucking, the work of "firemen" who cast wood into the furnaces of steamboats, and stevedoring-especially the work known as "cotton-screwing" by which ships in ports of the American South were jam-packed with cotton bales for export. 3 Beginning in the mid-1830s we find accounts that show not only a sudden increase in work-singing on American ships 4 (notably, Dana 1840), but also correspondences in repertoire between these deepwater songs and the shoreside songs of African-Americans. 5
Studia Celto-Slavica, 2021
This paper will analyse and assess material contained in a corpus of maritime memorates, or stories of the sea, collected in Ireland and Scotland, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is based on the Ulster University research project ‘Stories of the Sea: A Typological Study of Maritime Memorates in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic Folklore Traditions’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and aims to add to previous published studies on this subject, including Fomin and Mac Mathúna 2010, 2015, 2016. The focus of this paper is on matters relating to fishing, fishermen and their boats, in Ireland, especially on the Gaelic-speaking western seaboard, and to a lesser extent in Scotland, during the period under consideration. Most of the narrators and some of the collectors themselves were fishermen, and the close bond and shared beliefs and taboos between informant and collector serves to emphasise the personal nature of the accounts. The information gain...
The purpose of this research is to gain a better comprehension on shanties repertoire in its various aspects, both musical and social. This monodic, responsorial and mostly vocal repertoire had its golden age throughout the first half of the XIX century, fastly declining with the increasing in mechanical devices use on vessels and ports. Nowadays shanty singing, in its practical utility, can be considered as a "dead repertoire". Although no recordings from the late XIX century exist we can rely on an heterogeneus corpus of written sources: from board diaries to romantic-style and operatic piano adaptations, from the precious Stan Hugill's Shanties from the Seven Seas to scholars' reconstructions and transcriptions. The mainly source about melodies and their classification is, without any doubt, the Hugill volume, although it gives only a few information about how the shanties should really sound. The paper investigates the possible connections between this repertoire and afro-american music, anglo-american ballads, vaudeville, and other contemporary musical styles and genres on the atlantic coasts of Europe and North America during the XIX century. A special focus is on the classification parameters, an important aspect of ethnomusicological research. Generally we identify a shanty according to the devices where it was usually sung (while hoisting, working at the capstain, socializing in the forecastle ecc.), although not all scholars agree with this kind of classification. Finally we focus on the "dead horse rite", an important rite of passage commonly performed on commercial vessels while crossing the equator line.
The Maritime and Nautical Vocabulary of Le Voyage de saint Brendan
Neophilologus, 2011
Recognition that the Anglo-French adapter of the Latin Voyage of Saint Brendan had two mental nautical models, the leather-bottomed Irish boats of his written source and the Norse-derived clinker-built hulls of his own day and age assists in clarifying many scenes in the vernacular saint's life and thereby adds precision to our understanding of medieval nautical technology.
Grog Time o' Day: Southern Ports, Multi-ethnic Labor, and the Development of Sailors' Chanties
Society for Ethnomusicology, 2012
INTRO: In this paper I’ll be presenting a few ideas, selected for this occasion, from a much larger research project in historical musicology. That research aims to re-assess and expand knowledge of the performance style, historical development, and cultural position of the maritime work-songs known as chanties. Today I’ll zoom in on a particular phase of the genre’s early development: the circulation and exchange of African-American work- songs, in the first half of the 19th century, which I believe constituted the genre’s breeding ground. The chanty genre can be located at a nexus of style, form, and repertoire, and amongst flows of commerce, technology, ethnicity, and labor. Here, I emphasize repertoire and the juncture of ethnicity and labor in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico’s major ports—especially New Orleans and Mobile. It is in fact possible to argue, though I cannot apply enough rigor here to do so, that sailors’ chanties have their origins in New Orleans and her sister ports. It may also be possible to add another branch to the “tree” of musical forms sprouting from the American South, though I will leave it up to my audience to consider this after hearing some of the evidence.