Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents an excerpt from a Wikipedia article about shanties (chanties).
This excerpt focuses on the influence African American/West Indian works songs on shanties.
The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, folkloric, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to the unknown composers of chanties (shanties) and thanks to the authors of this Wikipedia page.
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This post is part of an ongoing pancocojams series on African Americans and West Indians chanties (shanties).
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/03/information-about-sea-shanty-collector.html for the closely related pancocojams post entitled "Information About Sea Shanty Collector Stan Hugill And Information About Harding, A West Indian Man Who Was The Source For A Number Of Shanties."
Also, click the tags given below for previous posts and subsequent posts on this subject.
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WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE EXCERPT
Note: This article uses the outdated and demeaning referent "negro" a number of times.
[retrieved March 16, 2022]
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_shanty#Influence_of_African-American_and_Caribbean_work_songs
…"In the first few decades of the 19th century,
European-American culture, especially the Anglophone—the sailors'
"Cheer'ly Man" and some capstan songs notwithstanding—was not known
for its work songs[citation needed]. By contrast, African workers, both in
Africa and in the New World, were widely noted to sing while working. According
to Gibb Schreffler, an Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College, European
observers found African work-singers remarkable (as Schreffler infers from tone
of their descriptions). Schreffler further infers that that work songs may have
been foreign to European culture[40] (See, however, references to nautical work
songs among European sailors appearing in such sources as The Tempest[41]).
Such references begin to appear in the late 18th century, whence one can see
the cliché develop that Black Africans "could not" work without
singing. For example, an observer in Martinique in 1806 wrote, "The
negroes have a different air and words for every kind of labour; sometimes they
sing, and their motions, even while cultivating the ground, keep time to the
music."[42] So while the depth of the African-American work song
traditions is now recognized,[43] in the early 19th century they stood in stark
contrast to the paucity of such traditions among European-Americans[citation
needed]. Thus while European sailors had learned to put short chants to use for
certain kinds of labor, the paradigm of a comprehensive system of developed
work songs for most tasks may have been contributed by the direct involvement
of or through the imitation of African-Americans.[40] The work contexts in
which African-Americans sang songs comparable to shanties included:
Boat-rowing on rivers of the south-eastern U.S. and Caribbean;
Corn-shucking parties on plantations of the south-eastern U.S.;
The work of stokers or "firemen," who cast wood
into the furnaces of steamboats plying great American rivers;
Stevedoring on the U.S. eastern seaboard, the Gulf Coast,
and the Caribbean—including "cotton-screwing" (using a large
jackscrew to compress and force cotton bales into the holds of outbound ships
at ports of the American South).
During the first half of the 19th century, some of the songs
African-Americans sang also began to appear in use for shipboard tasks, i.e. as
shanties.[44]
[…]
Perceptions of contemporary observers
Commenters on the ethnic or national origins of shanties,
writing in the 19th century when shanties were still in wide use, generally
supposed the genre to originate in the United States and recognized parallels
to African-American singing—as opposed to earlier English traditions from
Britain.[52] An early article to offer an opinion on the origin of shanties
(though not calling them by that name), appearing in Oberlin College's student
paper in 1858, drew a comparison between Africans' singing and sailor work
songs.
Along the African coast you will hear that dirge-like strain in all their songs, as at work or paddling their canoes to and from shore, they keep time to the music. On the southern plantations you will hear it also, and in the negro melodies every where, plaintive and melodious, sad and earnest. It seems like the dirge of national degradation, the wail of a race, stricken and crushed, familiar with tyranny, submission and unrequited labor ... And here I cannot help noticing the similarity existing between the working chorus of the sailors and the dirge-like negro melody, to which my attention was specially directed by an incident I witnessed or rather heard.[53]
The author went on to relate an incident in which he once heard "a well known strain of music", finding to his surprise that it was being sung by Black men rowing canoes. He claimed they were singing, "Heigh Jim along, Jim along Josey, Heigh Jim along, Jim along Jo!"[54] The implication is that this song was similar to a sailor song, probably the well-known shanty, "Haul Away, Joe" or "Haul Away for Rosie", viz.: "Way, haul away; O, haul away, my Rosey; Way, haul away; O, haul away, Joe."[55] The writer did not make a further connection to the minstrel song "Jim Along Josey",[56] a relationship to which is obvious, although it is unknown whether this was the inspiration for the shanty or vice versa.
In much of the shanty repertoire known today one finds parallels to the minstrel songs that came to popularity from the 1840s.[57] The poetic meter of the couplets of many minstrel songs is identical to those in shanties, and the non sequitur-type "floating verses" of those songs were heavily borrowed. In an influential early article about shanties, New York journalist William L. Alden drew a comparison between shanties and both authentic African-American songs and the quasi-African-American minstrel songs:
The old sailor songs had a peculiar individuality. They were barbaric in their wild melody. The only songs that in any way resemble them in character are "Dixie", and two or three other so-called negro songs by the same writer. This man, known in the minstrel profession as "Old Emmett", caught the true spirit of the African melodies—the lawless, half-mournful, half-exulting songs of the Kroomen. These and the sailor songs could never have been the songs of civilized men ... Undoubtedly many sailor songs have a negro origin. They are the reminiscences of melodies sung by negroes stowing cotton in the holds of ships in Southern ports. The "shanty-men," those hards of the forecastle, have preserved to some extent the meaningless words of negro choruses, and have modified the melodies so as to fit them for salt-water purposes. Certain other songs were unmistakably the work of English sailors of an uncertain but very remote period.[58]
Alden was not writing as a research historian, but rather as
an observer of the then-current shanty-singing. His, then, was an impression of
shanties based on their style and manner of performance, and he was writing at
a time when shanties had yet to become framed by writers and media as belonging
to any canon of national "folk music".
[…]
20th century
Formative writing
Folklorists of the first decade of the 20th century,
especially those from Britain, included shanties among their interests in
collecting folk songs connected with the idea of national heritage. Cecil Sharp
and his colleagues among the English Folk-Song Society were among the first to
take down the lyrics and tunes of shanties directly from the lips of veteran
sailors and to publish them more or less faithfully.[73] Their efforts were
matched by a number of less-rigorous articles and published collections issued
by former sailors themselves.[74] By the 1920s, the body of literature on
shanties had grown quite large, yet it was of variable quality. Most editors
presented "ideal" versions of songs—not reflecting any one way the
shanty may have been sung, but rather a composite picture, edited for print.
Bowdlerization and omission of lyrics were typical.[75] Moreover, few authors
were trained folklorists and even fewer maintained a critical historical
methodology. Editors customarily published fanciful, often nostalgic
introductions to the material that included unsubstantiated statements. As a
result, though much of the vanishing shanty repertoire was preserved in
skeletal form, aspects of the genre were re-envisioned according to
contemporary perceptions.[76]
These early 20th century collectors' choices of what to include, what to exclude, and how to frame the repertoire all had an effect on how following generations have viewed the genre. Because sailors who had sung shanties were by this time very old or dead, and the general public had little opportunity to experience performances of shanties, the representations by these authors were all the more influential in mediating information and creating the impression of "standard" versions of songs.[76]
[…]
The 1914 collection by Frank Thomas Bullen, Songs of Sea
Labour,[83] differed from the work of writers such as Masefield in having a
more practical, rather than romantic, tone. Bullen, an Englishman, was an
experienced shantyman, who sailed during the heyday of shanties to ports in the
Southern U.S. and the Caribbean.[84] He took a firm stance that only true work
songs should be included in his collection, thus resisting the temptation to
let shanties slide into the genres of ballads or other off-duty songs.
(Pressure of his publisher forced him to include two sea songs, clearly demarcated,
at the end of the book.[85]) And rather than shape the shanties to appear as
narrative pieces, he noted that, since most shanties would usually be
improvised, it would be disingenuous to present more than one or two sample
verses. As for his framing of the genre's origins, Bullen stated his belief
that, "[T]he great majority of these tunes undoubtably emanated from the
negroes of the Antilles and the Southern states, a most tuneful race if ever
there was one, men moreover who seemed unable to pick up a ropeyarn without a
song ..."[86] And Bullen's musicologist editor, Arnold, claimed,
"[T]he majority of the Chanties are Negroid in origin ..."[87]
Bullen's insistence on including only true work songs in the collection meant
that he likely omitted songs—generally those for heaving tasks, like capstan
work—which had been easily borrowed from the land-based traditions of various
nations. The effect of including only the most exclusively work-oriented songs
meant that a higher percentage of African-American songs were represented.
Somewhere between these perspectives was Cecil Sharp's,
whose English Folk-Chanteys (1914) was published in the same year, and was
based on shanties he collected from aged English sailors in Britain.[88] Sharp
responds to Bullen's claims of African-American origins by ceding that many
shanties were influenced through the singing of Black shantymen[89]—a position
that assumes English folk song was the core of the tradition by default. The
title of Sharp's work reflects his project of collecting and grouping shanties
as part of what he conceived to be a rather continuous English folk song
tradition. Sharp states in the introduction that he deliberately excluded
shanties which were obviously (i.e. to him) born of popular songs.[90] This
idea is problematic when one considers that the popular songs that were feeding
shanties were largely American and based in real or imagined African-American
musical traits. However, Sharp believed that by eliminating such shanties based
on popular songs, he could concentrate those that were "folk" songs.
Of his own admission, Sharp lacked any shantying or sea experience to
intuitively judge shanties like someone such as Bullen, however he offers his
objectivity, recording precisely what was sung to him, as consolation.[90] While
Sharp's manner of documenting shanties was more or less objective, the field of
his research and his biases in what to collect certainly influenced the outcome
of this study.[91] And whereas Bullen's work was fairly inaccessible, Sharp was
influential as the leader of a cohort of scholars who were actively creating
the young field of folk song research.”…
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