{"id":14662,"date":"2013-09-19T10:26:55","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T14:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/09\/19\/14662.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:22","slug":"sing-like-a-pirate-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/09\/19\/sing-like-a-pirate-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Sing Like a Pirate Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So.\n

I was conversing in real life with one Gentle Reader of this blog, a month or two ago, and one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, we had agreed to each make a playlist approximately an hour in length (call it the length of an audio CD, just for the sake of whatnot) with a collection of… sea chanteys.\n

We completed our playlists and exchanged them. We are big-category people, happily, and neither collection was comprised entirely of your actual chantey worksong. There were Songs of the Sea—songs of travel and ballads and drinking songs and skiffle songs and modern songs that sound a bit like chanteys until you try to heave the line together and half of you fall over because it turns out the song is in fucking five-four time, and one bonus mining song just because. You know? And the performers, too—Gentle Readers should not be too surprised that I looked for some unconventional covers by such seafarers as Sting, Bruce, Courtney Love, Roger McGuinn, and the Muppets, although in the event I largely stayed away from the ska-core, punk and heavy metal versions.\n

What you’re wondering, Gentle Reader, is this: how much overlap was there? When two good friends make such playlists, 25 songs on one and 24 on t’other, from such a genre, did they wind up choosing all the same songs and the same performers, different songs and different performers, or what? There was no communication between us about the contents (other than a quick clarification about acceptable levels of profanity, since as we expected these are being played in automobiles with young-uns, and we don’t want to give them more opportunities to embarrass us) during the gathering process, nor have we shared our favorite chanteys in the past. Our general musical tastes overlap quite a bit, tho’ there are certainly areas where they don’t so much, what with people being different one to another, which is what makes the world interesting and fun. So within a fairly narrow subgenre, and one moreover in which a few recording artists really stand out, did we come up with the same discs? Or different ones entirely?\n

I was surprised to discover that there is very little overlap between the two playlists. There is only one track that made it onto both lists: the “All for Me Grog” with (probably) Jeff Warner leading his brother Gerret as well as Louis Killen and Fud Benson. It’s available from the Smithsonian Folkways store<\/a>, by the way, and is an excellent version of an excellent song.\n

The nearest other overlap is that both playlists contain versions of “Barrett’s Privateers” featuring its composer Stan Rogers. My version was an absolutely terrific live one that turned out, once a person listened to it carefully, to begin halfway through the song. Tragically, that person who listened to it carefully enough was not YHB. Well, and there it is. Hmph.\n

There were five more chanteys that made it onto both playlists, though in very different versions. In two of the cases, they have different titles. One of those has different choruses on the two playlists, but “Haul Away, Joe” and “Haul Away for Rosie” are the same song, really, and count toward that overlap. The other differing title is called on one playlist “Away Rio” and on the other “Rio Grande”; neither has, I think, any greater claim to being the real<\/i> title than the other, and the lyrics and melodies are, at least so far as Your Unobservant Blogger has noticed, the same. That’s less true for the two versions of “What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor”—the melodies are the same, yes, but they have chosen different lyrics from the many available. By the way, Wikipedia asserts that until Burl Ives recorded it with the earl-aye<\/i> pronunciation, all the known versions have early<\/i> pronounced the usual way. Can this be true?\n

We also each chose versions of “South Australia” and “Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her”—I was tempted to go with the Lou Reed version of the latter, but didn’t. Lou Reed! Chantey! And yet… no.\n

And the other thirty-four tracks?\n

  1. “The Black Freighter”<\/li>
  2. “Blood Red Roses”<\/li>
  3. “Blow Ye Winds in the Morning”<\/li>
  4. “Bully in the Alley”<\/li>
  5. “Chicken on a Raft”<\/li>
  6. “Come All You Bold Sailormen”<\/li>
  7. “Eliza Lee”<\/li>
  8. “Farewell Nancy”<\/li>
  9. “Greenland Whale Fisheries”<\/li>
  10. “The Handsome Cabin Boy”<\/li>
  11. “Holy Ground”<\/li>
  12. “I’se the B’y that Builds the Boat”<\/li>
  13. “Irish Rover”<\/li>
  14. “Lukey’s Boat”<\/li>
  15. “Maggie May”<\/li>
  16. “Maid of Amsterdam”<\/li>
  17. “Married To a Mermaid”<\/li>
  18. “The Mary Ellen Carter”<\/li>
  19. “The Mermaid”<\/li>
  20. “Mister Stormalong”<\/li>
  21. “One for the Morning Glory”<\/li>
  22. “Pay Me My Money Down”<\/li>
  23. “Randy Dandy, O”<\/li>
  24. “Reuben Ranzo”<\/li>
  25. “Roll Alabama, Roll”<\/li>
  26. “Rolling Down to Old Maui”<\/li>
  27. “The Sailor’s Alphabet”<\/li>
  28. “Santy Anno”<\/li>
  29. “Sea Chanteys (Muppets)”<\/li>
  30. “Shoals of Herring”<\/li>
  31. “Spanish Ladies”<\/li>
  32. “Stormy Weather Boys”<\/li>
  33. “The Worst Pirate Song”<\/li>
  34. “Ye Mariners All”<\/li><\/ol>\n

    I was surprised, myself, that I didn’t choose songs from the American South Coasts, particularly from the African American tradition, because, hey, that’s practically blues, ain’t it? Only it turns out that (a) it’s not blues at all, no, and (2) it seems that most of those worksongs involve timing the long slow pull of fishing nets, and as such are long slow songs, and not as much fun as haul-yard songs.\n

    Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
    -Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In Which Your Humble Blogger is a broken man on a Halifax pier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-music-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16665,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14662\/revisions\/16665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}