This is our first album as a duo, recorded in 1995.

The words “chantey” and “shanty” are both pronounced “shan-tea” - we use them both because Richard prefers shanty and Peter prefers chantey. Both words mean the same thing: work songs from the days of wind-driven sailing vessels. Chanteys served as a tool to help sailors work as a team and lift their spirits while doing shipboard jobs. Chanteys were also sung by black stevedores while loading cargo. There is also a tradition of non-working songs known as forebitters, as well as a living tradition of songwriting about those who work and live on and near the sea.

Peter and Richard met around 1989 at Irish music parties and sessions in and around San Francisco. Our love of sea music, and our friendship, led us to the musical collaboration we have today. We hope you enjoy this CD, and learn some songs to sing in the process.

Front cover photo: Shipping scene at Broadway or Green Street wharf, San Francisco, California. Used with permission of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

All songs arranged by Richard Adrianowicz & Peter Kasin.

TEN STONE - Track 1

Lead: Richard

A stevedore (cargo loading) shanty from F.T. Bullen & W.F. Arnold’s book Songs of Sea Labour, 1914. Bullen states that the song is a Negro shanty but was not in common use on board ships. Only the first verse of each shanty is given and Bullen points out “The stubborn fact is that they had no set words beyond a starting verse or two and the fixed phrases of the chorus, which were very often not words at all. For all Chanties were impromptu as far as the words were concerned. Many a chantyman was prized in spite of his poor voice because of his improvisations. Poor doggerel they were mostly and often very lewd and filthy, but they gave the knowing and appreciative shipmates, who roared the refrain, much opportunity for laughter.”

More light is shed on this shanty from the east coast band The Boarding Party, whose version we use on this recording and who, in the liner notes for their album Too Far from the Shore, give some details that must have been obtained from a source other than Songs of Sea Labour:

Bullen heard this particular song as a "first voyage laddie" in 1869, sung by Negro stevedores loading cargo in the Demerara River near Georgetown, Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. It was used only for cargo loading, and was not in common use aboard ships. Bullen was taken by the singing of the Black gangs, and both he and Arnold felt that virtually all shanties, as well as many forms of gospel music, stemmed from the Negro music of "the southern states and the Antilles."

Bullen, a shantyman himself, states that only the opening verse, refrain lines, and chorus were standard for any given shanty; subsequent verses were improvised, some from other shanties and others made up on the spot. Thus he included only the "standard" portions of the songs, plus the tunes, in his book. In the spirit of improvisation, Jonathan borrowed from other Negro shanties found in Stan Hugill's definitive collection, Shanties from the Seven Seas, to complete the song.

After The Boarding Party had been singing this song for several years, we were told by an audience member in Prince George's County, Maryland, that he had heard "Ten Stone" sung by Black field hands in Eleuthera, Bahamas, to accompany "pickle picking."

HARD TIMES IN OLD VIRGINIA - Track 2

Lead: Peter

A cargo-loading chantey from the Georgia Sea Islands that Slave stevedores sang as they loaded Georgia-grown pine into the ship's hold. I first heard this sung at Mystic Seaport by Barry Finn, of New Hampshire. This version was learned from an Alan Lomax field recording, sung by John Davis and group. Lomax cites this as one of the earliest African American work songs.

HEAVE HER UP AND BUST HER - Track 3

Lead: Richard

A capstan shanty from Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors, by Ivan H. Walton and Joe Grimm, 2002.

Ivan H. Walton was a professor of American Literature at the University of Michigan who nurtured his interest in folklore with studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. In the 1920s Walton decided to compile a bibliography of the extensive body of Great Lakes literature, some of which contained references to the singing of sailor songs. In 1932, with five hundred dollars in university money and some of his own, he drove off in search of songs that had been dying since before his birth almost forty years earlier. From June 23 until September 8 of that summer, Walton drove 2200 hundred miles around Lake Michigan seeking out lighthouse keepers, librarians, and, especially, retired lakesmen. He visited the remote Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan many times and, in 1938, he began making field recordings on wax platters with a primitive, suitcase-sized recorder. Walton made similar trips around Lakes Erie and Ontario in 1933. Despite dead ends and disappointments, Walton found many men who recalled hundreds of songs, in part or in whole. Walton died in 1968 and this book, representing a portion of his collecting, was finally published in 2002. The primary source for Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors is the Ivan H. Walton Collection in the Michigan Historical Collections at the University of Michigan's Bently Historical Library. The eighteen boxes that comprise the Walton Collection contain the correspondence, articles, recordings, class notes, travel diaries, musical scores, transcripts, clippings, lyrics, background, notes, lists, and jots that make it the richest collection of Great Lakes chanteys in existence.

Professor Walton met one of his best informants, retired sailor Robert Collen, at a Chicago sailors' union hall. At one of their first meetings in 1932 Collen pulled from his coat pocket a handful of songs on assorted pieces of paper. Thumbing through them, he half talked and half sang a number of old songs, some from the shore and some from the sea. Some, he said, he had learned in 1880 during his first trip on the ocean as an apprentice seaman. He had, as a boy, run away from home and shipped on an outward-bound Liverpool square-rigger. In the late 1880s he had worked his way on an Erie Canal boat from New York to Buffalo and then sailed on the Lakes until the schooner days ran out. "Steam-boatin' ain't no fit work for a real sailorman," he said. Collen stated that he sometimes acted as chanteyman on old Lake schooners "when der wan't no better one aboard." He explained in some detail that chanteys "ain't no regular songs," that crews sing the same regular choruses on all ships, but the chanteyman "just makes up the rest of 'em as he goes along," and he added that he couldn't sing one twice the same way if he wanted to, "so der ain't no way to write 'em down."

To "heave" a vessel up and "bust" her meant to wind in the anchor chain so as to draw the vessel directly up over the anchor, and then to pull it free of the mud holding it. Professor Walton points out that the verses of this anchor-weighing chantey reflect several themes popular among sailors. The first jokes about sailing ships being pulled around at the end of a towline; there is the familiar gibe at smoke-belching tugs; the sailor's image of himself as a ladies' man and the dig at soft landlubbers who had better chow and easier lives than the hardworking sailors.

The version of this chantey printed in the book is put together from verses supplied by Jim McCarthy, J. Slyvester, "Ves" Ray, and William J. Small, all of Port Huron, Michigan. The version I sing on this recording is a combination of some of the verses from the book and the version sung by The Boarding Party – they must have had access to some of the original material collected by Walton because their version differs from the one in the book. There was no tune for this song in the book and the melody I use is one composed by the late Jonathan Eberhart who sang with the The Boarding Party.

DOWN TRINIDAD - Track 4

Lead: Peter

A cargo-loading chantey from Barbados. The song is in the James Madison Carpenter collection, held at the Smithsonian Institution's Archive of American Folk Culture. Carpenter collected it in 1928 from Richard Warner of Cardiff, Wales, who in turn heard it sung aboard ship in the 1870's. The lyrics were kindly supplied to me by Robert Walser, who recorded it on his fine CD of rare songs, When Our Ship Comes Home.

GOODBYE, MY LOVER, GOODBYE - Track 5

Lead: Richard
Chorus: Peter, Dick Holdstock, Denis Franklin, and Shay Black

Another capstan shanty from the Great Lakes sailors in America that was used frequently on grain boats in Chicago or Milwaukee, also taken from Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors by Ivan H. Walton and Joe Grimm, 2002.

Concerning Goodbye, My Lover, Goodbye, Walton says "This chantey was sung when all hands worked the capstan kedging a vessel out of her loading dock or raising anchor preparatory to towing out of the harbor for a down trip to Buffalo. It expressed none too subtly the professional sailor's contempt for landlubbers and, like all other chanteys, could be extended as long as the chanteyman could think of new rhymes. The general idea seems to be that the greenhorn sailor will be a wiser man when he reaches port. This is collected from Captain Thomas Hylant of Buffalo and George Leach of St. Clair, Michigan."

SCARBOROUGH FISHERMEN - Track 6

(MCPS/PRS Richard Grainger and Klondike Music)

Lead and fiddle: Peter
Guitar, harmony, and D whistle: Richard

Composed by Richard Grainger, a fine singer, songwriter, and guitar player in the Teeside area of Yorkshire. This is Grainger's ode to the fishermen of Scarborough, on Yorkshire's Northeast coast, who fish in the North Sea.

MOBILE BAY (aka JOHN COME TELL US AS WE HAUL AWAY) - Track 7

Lead: Peter & Richard

This shanty was often used at the pumps and it is one of the very few work songs calling for two shantymen.

Stan Hugill says, in his book Shanties from the Seven Seas, "Another popular 'Johnny' shanty was that known as John, Come Tell Us As We Haul Away (alternative title, Mobile Bay). It was often sung at the pumps when the word 'pump' would be substituted for the word 'haul', although in the more modern flywheel type of pump where a bell-rope was used both words were equally appropriate. It probably started life as a cotton hoosiers' song down in the Gulf Ports. It was one of the very few shanties that had two singers for the solo lines. Billy Boy too was sung in this fashion. It was also used at halyards by some shantymen. I have given the line 'Aye, aye, haul aye' as a solo and marked the hauling words in the refrains on account of this. It was also used at the windlass and capstan when the word 'heave' would be substituted for 'pump' or 'haul'. Ex-shantyman Stanley Slade of Bristol, who has recorded this for H.M.V., puts the regular shantyman's 'yodel' into the line 'Hay-ey-ey haul-ey!' (third solo), his version of the shanty being a hauling one."

HILLS OF ISLE AU HAUT - Track 8

Lead and guitar: Richard
Fiddle: Peter
Concertina: Ricky Rackin

Isle au Haut is a small island on the eastern fringe of Penobscot Bay, located roughly halfway up the Maine coast. Named in 1604 by French explorer Samuel de Champlain, the name literally translates as "the high island."

THE TWENTY-THIRD OF MARCH - Track 9

Lead: Peter

From the days of the sailing ship whalers, collected by W.P. Merrick in 1900. The harsh life of whalermen, and their voracious appetite ashore for the pleasures of drink, long denied at sea, is reflected in this well-known forebitter.

JIGS - CONNIE THE SAILOR/THE ROLLING WAVE - Track 10

SWING YOUR TAIL - Track 11

Lead: Richard

A capstan shanty collected by Helen Creighton from William H. Smith in Liverpool, August 15, 1948. Smith claimed, when interviewed, that this was "sung in most all the ships. In our port and foreign too … yes, from Liverpool and I've heard it out in the West Indies ships getting underway there or warpin' in …"

I obtained a copy of Sea Songs and Ballads from Nineteenth Century Nova Scotia: The William H. Smith and Fenwick Hatt Manuscripts, edited by Edith Fowke but the section of this book on Smith, titled "Chanties and other Songs of the Sea" recalled by William H. Smith, contains no mention of the song Swing Your Tail but does give some background on Smith: "William Smith (1867-1955) went to sea as a boy in fishing schooners out of Liverpool. At about eighteen he transferred to the brigantine Ihyaline and other windjammers carrying lumber and fish to the Caribbean and South America, and bringing back cargoes of hides, logwood, sugar, molasses and rum. After his marriage he worked ashore as a carpenter and rigger in Liverpool shipyards, and when that work became scarce he learned the diver's job and worked for several years with a salvage steamer on the Nova Scotia coast."

I have contacted the Helen Creighton Folklore Society to try to obtain a cassette copy of her interview with Smith. Swing Your Tail appears on the double cd recording "Songs of the Sea" that was released recently by the Society. According to the liner notes, the interview with Smith is on the following archive tape: AC:2290 - MF NO. 289.344, recorded in Liverpool, August 15, 1948.

The first four verses I sing are from the Helen Creighton recording. The rest of the lyrics are "floating verses" culled from other shanties. A shanty needed to last as long as the work being done and it was typical of a shantyman to keep the song going by either making up verses on the spot or using verses from other shanties.

Despite Smith's claims, this shanty only appears in one other collection that I know of. James M. Carpenter recorded John Middleton singing the Mind How You Swing Your Tail in Leith, 1928 – the song appears on the Folktrax recording FTX-142, The Hog's Eye Man, Archive Shanties and Sea Songs 2. Only one verse and chorus are given to the song with the first line of the verse being "O the people in da Souf dey've all got tails."

James Carpenter was an American College professor who visited Britain with a disk recording machine, 1928-9, and managed to catch 45 of the then surviving shanty-men in Britain.

Alan Lomax collected a different Swing Your Tail sung by a group of men from Andros Island, Bahamas in 1935 that is more related to the shanty Bulldog Don't Bite Me.

MORLAIX BRIDGE - Track 12

Lead: Peter
Chorus: Richard, Dick Holdstock, Denis Franklin, and Shay Black

A hauling chantey from Brittany, found in Stan Hugill's Songs of the Seas.

HOMEWARD BOUND (aka GOODBYE, FARE YOU WELL) - Track 13

Lead: Richard
Chorus: Peter, Dick Holdstock, Denis Franklin, Shay Black

A capstan shanty from the book Chanteying Aboard American Ships. A rare version with double stanzas, this is more commonly known as "Goodbye Fare You Well," one of the most popular homeward-bound shanties. F.P. Harlow, the book's author, says "This chantey is sometimes sung at the windlass, using only the first half, but a good chanteyman can greatly improve the song, which is a rouser with good voices, by singing the double stanza as given above … "

Stan Hugill, in Shanties from the Seven Seas, remarks,

"… the most popular homeward-bound shanty of them all – with, perhaps, the exception of Rolling Home – Goodbye, Fare-ye-well. This was sung at the windlass or capstan when raising the anchor, and I know of four versions common to seamen the world over. The first version I learnt from an A.B. [Able-Bodied seaman] known as 'Archie', ex New Zealand brigantine Aratapu.

Usual homeward-bound sentiments
Verses taken from the old forebitter Homeward Bound
The 'Milkmaid' (see Blow the Man Down)
Verses from The Dreadnaught

… the homeward-bound song Goodbye, Fare-ye-well was invariably heard at its best in South American ports like Iquique, where the saltpeter and nitrate traders would lie, often as many as two hundred ships at a time, awaiting or loading their cargoes. When at last a ship was ready to sail crews of the other ships in port would, as Captain F. Shaw relates in his book Splendour of the Seas, board the homeward-bounder to help raise the anchor and swell the song. 'That was when a capstan shanty was really sung … as many as two hundred voices chorusing heartily.' A sight and sound now gone forever!"

THE SAILOR LADDIE - SONG AND MARCH - Track 14

Lead and fiddle: Peter
Guitar: Richard
Concertina: Ricky Rackin

The Sailor Laddie is a traditional sea song from Dundee, Scotland, expressing a young woman's love for, and pride in, her man who sails aboard a whaling ship. Scottish Singer Christine Kydd taught this in her Scottish song workshops at the Valley Of The Moon School of Scottish Fiddling, held in Northern California. Following the song is a march composed by Peter.

TWO JOLLY FISHERMEN - Track 15

Lead: Peter & Richard

More commonly known as Three Jolly Fishermen – a popular favorite from Whitby in Yorkshire, England. The "merry, merry bells" mentioned are the Bells of St. Mary's church up on the cliff top. In the chorus we sing "come buy a broil of herring" in place of "for me fine fry of herring" – this comes from the broadside Caller Herring printed c1840 by W. & T. Fordyce, Dean Street, Newcastle. The "come buy my silver herring" verse comes from the broadside sheet and Richard composed the last two verses.

Roy Palmer, in his book Boxing the Compass (re-printing of The Oxford Book of Sea Songs with a new title) says "Steve Gardham recorded this [Three Jolly Fishermen] from Thomas Calvert of Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire, in 1971. The song, which seems to have been a particular favourite in the Whitby area (though Cecil Sharp had a version from Middlesex, attached to a dance), was issued on a broadside printed in 1837-8 by W. and T. Fordyce, Newcastle, under the title of 'Caller Herring.' This in turn loosely derives from a song of the same name by Lady Carolina Nairne (1766-1845), published in 1824 to a tune by Nathaniel Gow (1777-1831), based on 'the original Cry of the Newhaven fish wives, selling their fresh herrings in the streets of Edinburgh.' Gow's tune was issued as a shilling music sheet for piano in c. 1802."

PULL DOWN BELOW - Track 16

Lead: Richard

A shanty learned from the singing of Stan Hugill. This song appears on a cassette tape titled A Salty Fore Topman, Stan Hugill with Stormalong John, possibly recorded around 1989 at the studios of BBC Radio Merseyside. Stormalong John is a Liverpool shanty group based at the Mersey Maritime Museum. They performed throughout Britain, in Brittany, Germany and Poland, and regularly accompanied Stan Hugill in concerts. Hugill says, in the liner notes of the cassette, that Pull Down Below was collected from the Maritime States [of Canada, I presume], turning up again in the West Indies after the Second World War. It has been cited as both a halyard and a towing song.

The Nautical Song Circle in Victoria, BC, Canada on Vancouver Island featured a version of Pull Down Below called Eagle Alley as the July 1999 Song Of The Month:

EAGLE ALLEY

I went to church, I went to chapel
Pull down below
I went to church, I went to chapel
Pull down below.

Away Eagle Alley, pull down below
Oh, Eagle Alley in the valley, pull down below

And on the road I found an apple. ...
And it's who's been here since I've been gone?...

It's a Yankee mate wid his big boots on....
And it's who's been here since I've been gone?...

It's Lime Juice mate with his cheese cutter on....
I went to church, I went to chapel....

A-way Eagle Alley, pull down below
Oh, Eagle Alley in the valley, pull down below

Oh oh, oh, away Eagle Alley, pull down below
Oh, Eagle Alley in the valley, pull down below...

Traditional. Recorded by Shanghaied On The Willamette - Jonathan Lay & Gordy Euler, on "Weighing Anchor". Collected by James Madison Carpenter who made a partial recording of "Pull Down Below" [Pull Down Below is the title of the shanty in the Madison Collection, not Eagle Alley] as sung by Reece Baldwyn in Wales in 1928.

The original field recordings of the Madison Collection were made on primitive wax cylinder recording devices. Add that to the fact that a majority of singers recorded were old men well past their singing prime and you get a lot of mumbled words. The two CD version of the Carpenter Collection that I have does not include Pull Down Below but most of the tracks are quite unintelligible. Unfortunately the compact disks did not come with a lyric sheet.

YANKEE JOHN, STORMALONG - Track 17

Lead: Peter

There are many chanteys about Stormalong, the fictional sea captain who embodies all that is brave, kind, and pure; a sort of seagoing Paul Bunyan figure. This is a West Indian version, collected by Roger D. Abrahams in his book, Deep The Water, Shallow The Shore: Three Essays On Shantying in the West Indies.

SUNDOWN BELOW - Track 18

Lead: Richard
Chorus: Peter, Dick Holdstock, Denis Franklin, Shay Black

A cargo loading shanty taken from F.P. Harlow's Chanteying Aboard American Ships, 1962. Harlow says "Sun Down Below, Mobile Bay, Way Sing Sally, and Hilo, My Ranzo Way, are purely West Indian Negro chanteys sung while hoisting cargo from the hold of ships and seldom if ever sung by sailors at the halliards." They may have been sung more frequently than Harlow suggests. Stan Hugill, in Shanties from the Seven Seas, notes that Mobile Bay was sung by sailors aboard ship at the halyards and at the capstan and pumps.

This song is also mentioned in Lydia Parrish's book, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands, 1942. Parrish says "This tune was sung at the end of the day as a hint to the captain, when the hold was too dark for the stevedores to see what they were doing." Verses three and four come from the Lydia Parrish book.