A Partial Taxonomy of "American Maritime Music" (original) (raw)
Related papers
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as questionable. 2 Discussants since the time of Sharp's generation have tended to be more generous in This is an unpublished conference paper ©Gibb Schreffler.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.
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.
Ethnic Choices in the Presentation of Chanties: A Study in Repertoire
Society for Ethnomusicology, 2011
INTRO: The genre of maritime work-songs known as chanties has taken on particular ethnic and national associations today that differ from its associations during its heyday in the 19 th century. A number of processes, driven by the needs, interests, biases, and consequent choices of the individuals who have presented chanties, have all interacted to influence a shift in perception. I will concentrate on just one type of change, pertaining to the genre's repertoire, which was engendered by performers and writers during the mid-20 th century Anglophone Folk Music Revival. The manner of singing, the language and lyrics, and the interpretive stories behind each song were reconstituted at that time and, as a result, presentations helped to corroborate even earlier 20 th century notions, new for their time, that the chanty genre was something essentially or typically English or White British. This period, the 1950s-60s, was ground zero for new narratives of the chanty repertoire that inform how most people perceive it today. Such a perception exists despite the fact that, up through the 19 th century, chanties were best associated with America and, in particular, with African-American songs. This paper investigates the historical trajectory of a well-known piece of chanty repertoire to illustrate the sort of atomic changes, resulting from choices in presentation, that have resulted in marginalizing the prior African-American associations with the genre.
Wild and Plaintive: ‘Hearing’ Ethnicity in Historical Chanty-Singing
Society for Ethnomusicology, 2014
INTRO: This presentation concerns the style of chanty-singing, an historical genre of work-songs that (according to my research) emerged primarily from African-American paradigms of singing and developed amongst workers in the racially “shared” professions of stevedore and merchant sailor. Chanty-singing appeared in ports of the Americas by the 1810s, and in sea vessels serving these regions in the 1830s. A gradual reduction in the need for heavy manual labor engendered the decline of the genre’s practice starting by the 1880s. Significant academic attention to the genre, especially by gentlemen folklorists from Britain, began after it had practically disappeared, in the first decade of the 20th century. Media representing the substantially re-envisioned genre subsequently accumulated through the middle of the 20th century, and provided sources for performers in the transatlantic Folk music revival. This in turn re-inscribed chanties with associations and Anglocentric aesthetics of mediated Folk music. The broader effect of this development, from a work-song genre to a folklorized leisure genre, and through the lenses of early folklore scholarship, mass mediation, and popular revival, were changes to the general public’s vision of the genre’s history and cultural associations. In a previous meeting of this SEM chapter, I addressed these changes in the perception of chanty-singing’s cultural or ethnic “origins,” in particular as they were influenced by a body of discourse focused chiefly on lyrical texts and melodic modes. The present paper concerns the matter of singing style—the sound dimension of chanties. I offer evidence, from 19th century-based statements, along with field-recordings of a traditional sailor-singer, to interpret the impressions made by the sound of chanty-singing when the genre was in its prime. My hope is that this attempt to “hear” history will add to the interpretive angles of scholars, to encourage them to consider the genre’s sound along with its other aspects. With respect to ethnomusicology generally, my intent is to offer an example of a diachronic study of relationships between a singing style (sound), meaning, and ethnicity.
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
Transatlantic Songs and Music CFP
Transatlantic Songs and Music CFP, 2023
This Call-for-Chapters invites researchers to prepare submissions for our edited book about transatlantic and Atlantic-intersecting songs and music. These pivotal forms of transoceanic cultural expression, preservation, exchange, and innovation reveal creative, inventive, linguistic, historical, religious, social, ludic, and emotional aspects of experience. We welcome contributions about transatlantic and Atlantic-intersecting songs and music from authors working in musicology, linguistics, cultural studies, literary criticism, ethnology, historiography, religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, among other disciplines.