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An album released in 1979 dedicated to the celebration of maritime work songs that captures the spirit of those it is dedicated to featuring the voices of noted English Folk singers and shantymen Stan Hugill and Lou Killen.
It’s two years since the media declared 2021 the ‘year of the sea shanty’ due to a bunch of drippy middle class townies taking to Tik Tok to sing old time maritime songs. A long way from what author Harold Whates said in The Background of Sea Shanties from 1937
“The purpose of a hauling shanty was rhythm to the task of extracting just that last ounce from men habitually weary, overworked and underfed.”
Not that we were unhappy with the development as sea-shanties have been a mainstay of Celtic and Celtic-Punk but as usual the people who did actually keep these songs alive were written out of the story. The 70’s were a golden period for Folk music and this album recorded at the very end of the decade live at at the Seattle Chantey Festival is a beautiful example of a music that may fade but will never die.
shanty
shanty, also spelled CHANTEY, or CHANTY (from French chanter, “to sing”), English-language sailors’ work song dating from the days of sailing ships, when manipulating heavy sails, by means of ropes, from positions on the deck constituted a large part of a sailor’s work. The leader, or shantyman, chosen for his seamanship rather than his musical talent, stood at the leading position on the rope, while the sailors crouched along the rope behind him. The shantyman would intone a line of a song and the group respond in chorus, heaving on the rope at a given point in the melody. The shantyman was one of the crucial members of the ship’s crew, and it was said that “a good shantyman was worth four extra hands on the rope.” He selected a song of appropriate type and speed for the task, and, by improvising verses, he could spin the song out for as long as needed; shanty texts are thus far more fluid than published versions indicate.
Shanty texts reflect the realities of the sailors’ lives, from bad food to captains’ virtues and flaws and stories of easy women. The tunes were drawn from ballads and other familiar melodies.
There were three principal types of shanties: short-haul, or short-drag, shanties, which were simple songs sung when only a few pulls were needed; halyard shanties, for jobs such as hoisting sail, in which a pull-and-relax rhythm was required (e.g., “Blow the Man Down”); and windlass, or capstan, shanties, which synchronised footsteps in jobs such as hoisting anchor (e.g., “Shenandoah,” “Rio Grande,” “A-Roving”).
ALBUM SLEEVE NOTES
“The sparkling summer skies of Seattle smiled down as July turned to August over Puget Sound. I was fortunate, along with the rest of the musical X Seamen’s Institute, to join in a solid week of song to welcome ships and sailors of the American Sail Training Association’s 1978 Tall Ships Pacific. And the company of English singer Louis Killen and the legendary Stan Hugill made the week unforgettable.
Greeting the US Coast Guard’s majestic training bark Eagle, accompanied by a fleet of smaller square-riggers, yachts and wooden fishing vessels, was an international host of chantey singers, gathered from across the nation and across the sea to join in the choruses of sea music, from soulful forebitters to rousing capstan and halyard chanteys. After a week of singing and sailing in the matchless Northwest air and sea, we all came away with a feeling that sea music is a still-growing and living tradition-and we and the thousands in our audiences had shared a very special time together.
The tradition will continue to grow, as yearly festivals are being planned, the next one on the East Coast to be sponsored by the American Sail Training Association, the National Maritime Historical Society, and Tapinta.”
ALBUM TRACKLIST
1 – Racine Morton & Marc Bridgham – Ize the Boy
2 – Dan Aguiar – Santianno
3 – Louis Killen – Shoals of Herring
4 – Clark Branson – Hanging Johnny
5 – Paddy Hernon – Mingulay Boat Song
6 – Mary Benson – Roll the Old Chariot
7 – Stan Hugill – Lowlands
8 – Stan Hugill – A Long Long Time Ago
9 – Mary Wilson – Sailboat Malarkey
10 – Louis Killen – The Bleecher Lass of Kelvin Hall
11 – John Townley – Run Come See
12 – Dave Baumgarten with Blue Sandrock – Greenland Fisheries
13 – Bernie Klay – The Sailor’s Alphabet
14 – Dan Aguiar – Alice Wentworth
Louis Killen, Liverpool * Stan Hugill, Aberdovy, Wales *
X-Seamen’s Institute, New York City:
Bernie Klay * Frank Woerner * John Townley * Dan Aguiar * Dave Baumgarten with Blue Sandrock, Seattle * Racine Morton and Marc Bridgham, Seattle * Mary Benson, Portland * Paddy Hernon, Vancouver * Clark Branson, San Jose * Mary Wilson, Seattle *
The X-Seaman’s Institute was a rollicking quartet devoted to nautical and maritime music that regularly performed at South Street Seaport Museum in New York City. On July 4th 1976 they were the feature performers for the Bicentennial Tall Ships festival and entertained a crowd estimated at 20,000. Other concerts followed up and down the East coast from Boston’s historic Old Ironsides to The New Bedford Seamen’s Bethel and Mystic Seaport, to the National Maritime Museum in Norfolk, Va. They currently have five albums available as CDs or individual cuts for downloads at www.folkways.si.edu.
DOWNLOAD THE ALBUM HERE
LONDON CELTIC PUNKS WEB-ZINE 
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