This is part of a series of posts about the retired sailor and shanty singer Patrick Tayluer (1856-1948). Find the entire series at this link!
“It would be a permanent loss to let Tayluer go unrecorded…. A complete record of his material will be an important step in rounding out our knowledge of the sea’s folk-songs and traditions.”
So wrote the collector William Main Doerflinger in 1942, soliciting the use of the Library of Congress’s equipment to record the songs and stories of Patrick Tayluer, a retired sailor and adventurer. Luckily, Alan Lomax shared Doerflinger’s enthusiasm, and the latter made about 80 recordings of Tayluer, which are here in the AFC archive. If you’ve been following this series (find all the posts here!) you’ve heard some of his best shanties already. Let’s listen to one more, the song often known as “Blow, Boys, Blow.” Hear it in the player, and follow the transcript below.
Now, it’s blow, you winds, how I long to hear you; Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, blow, you winds, how I long to hear you; Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, there’s a Yankee ship lies a yonder in the river; Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, there’s a Yankee ship lies yonder in the river; Blow, my bully boys, blow!
She’s a Yankee ship and a Yankee clipper! Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, she’s a Yankee ship and a Yankee clipper! Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Now how do you know that she’s a Yankee clipper? Blow, boys, blow!
Oh how do you know that she’s a Yankee clipper? Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, her spars are of gold and her masts of silver. Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, her spars are of gold and her masts of silver. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
She’s got a bronco mate and a bronco skipper. Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, she has a bronco mate and a bronco skipper. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Now who…is the captain of ‘er? Blow, boys, blow!
Oh who…is the captain of ‘er? Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Why, it’s Yankee Pete o’ Massandatter! Blow, boys, blow!
Why, it’s Yankee Pete o’ Massandatter! Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Now who…is the chief mate of ‘er? Blow, boys, blow!
Oh who…is the chief mate of ‘er? Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Why, it’s big Black Pete, the Boston slugger! Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it’s big Black Pete, oh the Boston slugger! Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, what do you think, now, they’ll ‘ave for dinner? Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, what do you think, now, they’ll ‘ave for dinner? Blow, my bully boys, blow!
It’s it’s a monkey’s ‘eart and a donkey’s liver. Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it’s a monkey’s ‘eart and a donkey’s liver. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Now who do you think is the doctor of her? Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, who do you think is the doctor of her? Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, it’s Slushy Sam, the dirty big brother, Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it’s Slushy Sam, the dirty big brother, Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Of Dick Murphy, the boarding master. Blow, boys, blow!
Of Dick Murphy, the boarding master. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, you’ll blow now, you’ll blow forever. Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, you’ll blow now, and you’ll blow forever. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, look at ‘er now as she comes down the river. Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, look at ‘er now as she comes down the river. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Look at her scotchmen all a hangin’ in the riggin’. Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, look at her scotchmen all a hangin’ in the riggin’. Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Aw, they shine like gold instead of silver! Blow, boys, blow!
Aw, they shine like gold instead of silver! Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Oh, look at the those heavy tops’ls on ‘er! Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, look at those heavy tops’ls on ‘er! Blow, my bully boys, blow!
Now, it’s blow, you winds, I’ve longed to hear you! Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, blow, you wainds, oh, I’ve longed to hear you! Blow, my bully boys, blow!
(I should mention a technical detail here. In case you were worried about hanging crew members, a “scotchman” is a polished wood batten that prevents rough rope-ends from chafing and wearing through the sails.)
Opinions are divided as to the roots of “Blow, Boys, Blow.” Many versions of the song mention slave traders operating up the Congo River. Some scholars suggest it was written about the illegal slave trade and later adapted to refer to legitimate merchant ships, while others think it’s the other way around. Either way, it’s interesting that in many versions the first mate of the ship is Black, either “a big Mulatto who came from Antigua” in a version mentioned by Joanna Colcord, “Pompey Squash” (identified as Black by an epithet I won’t repeat) in a version given by Stan Hugill, or “Big Black Joe the Boston slugger” in Tayluer’s version. It’s true that sailing offered better opportunities for Black men than many other occupations just before the Civil War. This was especially true in New England vessels. The whaling trade is famous for employing many Black sailors and officers, and the New England merchant trade did so as well. There are several Black captains recorded in Maine in the 1850s, who were active when Tayluer was growing up there, and there’s no doubt Tayluer served alongside Black sailors and possibly under Black officers.
The importance of people of African descent to the maritime trades and to shanties in particular figures into Tayluer’s beliefs in other ways as well, which we’ll see soon. Before we get to that, let’s outline the kinds of things Tayluer and Doerflinger discussed. The discs contain quite a few interview questions and answers, including sections in which Doerflinger asks Tayluer to describe such actions as getting a square-rigger underway, putting a square-rigged ship about, and taking in a topsail, complete with all the commands the officers might call to the crew and one verse of each shanty that might be sung. These sections are fascinating, especially to nautical specialists, and you can come hear them in the Folklife Research Center.
In this post, I’ll concentrate on more general questions about how shanties worked and how they fit into sailors’ lives. We’ll hear some of the audio below, but here’s a bit of the interview I transcribed, dealing with some of these questions. Note how Doerflinger asks about variation, but wisely allows Tayluer to explain how shanties helped with both physical and emotional hardships of a sailor’s life, before circling back and asking his more practical question a second time:
William Doerflinger: Captain , would you tell us how the shantyman made up his song and fitted it to the occasion? How much variation was there?
Patrick Tayluer: Oh yes, Bill, I’ll tell you that. That’s a very simple thing. Every sailor on board of a ship always had his notions in singing something to what he was going to do. There was always the shanties in hoisting a topsail, in hoisting a topgallantsail, and even in hoisting the spanker and so forth. Those shanties, they were made up by the men as they went, and they didn’t care, as long as the song fitted in with their haul. And the hauling part of the question sometimes was really hard because the seas were rough, and the men had quite a storm, perhaps, to put up with going out to sea. Sometimes the ship was rolling at an angle of 30 or 35 degrees. I won’t say 45, because if I did, you know what that would mean, she was nearly capsizing. But I have really seen the yardarms dipping into the water, and those sailors there hauling on the sky halyards and singing their shanties. The shanties was a great help to a sailor, the same as it was a great help to every man, even down in Mobile and those places where they loaded the cotton, they sung their shanties; even in Africa, where the men done their work, they sung their shanties.
William Doerflinger: Even in the hot weather?
Patrick Tayluer: In the hot weather, yes, the men would sing their shanties just the same as per usual.
William Doerflinger: Would the shantyman often get a laugh from the gang on the rope?
Patrick Tayluer: No, he wouldn’t get the laugh, but he would be thought that he was the man who had really led the crowd to join up into something gleeful.
William Doerflinger: But I imagine they enjoyed a humorous bit when it was the shanty that brought it in.
Patrick Tayluer: Oh yes, yes. They always enjoyed a little joke out of somebody, but mostly the joke laid on the chief officer, and he took it. And very often, when that joke was passed along, the sailor would have the laugh of him and he would not have the laugh of the sailor. So you can quite understand that everything on board of a ship in those days when the men worked together, they weren’t the same as you always read about. They weren’t always the life of a dog, but every sailor was called an old sea dog, and he admired the name, and he loved it. And therefore you can think to yourselves that when the sailor put his mind and his art into his ship, he didn’t care what came along.
William Doerflinger: As long as there was a shanty now and then. It helped him the worst of weather,
Patrick Tayluer: That’s right, he cheered them up, and it helped them over the stile, as the saying goes.
William Doerflinger: So that’s, in other words, the shanties varied every time they were sung, and I suppose one would hardly ever hear the same song sung twice through the same way, even by the same man.
Patrick Tayluer: No, you would not. Every shanty was sung on board of the ship, but you would never hear the same tune or the same words put to the shanty. There was always a difference, and a variation between them.
Tayluer has briefly touched on some aspects of shantying that other experts have also noted: shanties were one of the few contexts in which sailors could complain or make fun of their officers, and as Tayluer says, the officer who was the butt of the joke “took it,” to the point that the sailor often got the last laugh. This helped the sailor feel his life was not “the life of a dog.” The shanties cheered the sailors up, helped in their work, and helped their mental well-being. For his part, a good shantyman gained in status among his crewmates by being thought of as “the man who had really led the crowd to join up into something gleeful.”
Tayluer also points out that shanties were shared with land-based workers in “Mobile and those places where they loaded the cotton.” This work was done by primarily African American work crews. Modern scholars believe that these work crews in Southern U.S. ports such as Mobile and New Orleans, which had strong French influence, were important to the development of the shanty as a genre–perhaps even its culture of origin. Presumably, the fact that he was thinking of mostly Black workers in the South is what reminded Tayluer to next mention Africa as a place where men sang shanties. As we’ll see, this is a point he made on other discs as well.
Tayluer told Doerflinger about some other details of how shanties worked. Let’s hear a brief audio clip, which includes a verse of the classic shanty “Blow the Man Down.” You’ll find a transcription just below the player.
William Doerflinger: Captain, I’d like to ask you a few questions about shanty singing. One thing I’d like to ask about is this: when a shanty was sung by a gang of men in work on shipboard, did the singing of a shanty cause them to work harder? Or, on the other hand, did it give the crew a chance to relax a little? What would you say about that?
Patrick Tayluer: Well, it gave them a chance of pulling harder, but it also gave them a chance of relaxing. Now, for instance, while the downhaul man was singing the choru…the verse, the men had a chance of relaxing.
William Doerflinger: I’ve noticed, Captain, that when you’re singing a shanty, there’s a little hitch in your voice.
Patrick Tayluer: Yes, that little hitch is always given by a good shantyman on the downhaul simply because it warns the sailors when to get down and start their pull and when it’s about to be stand up from pulling.
William Doerflinger: Sing one verse, if you would, just to illustrate the hitch a good shanty man always introduced.
Patrick Tayluer: Well, the shanty goes something like this here:
Oh, blow the man down, and we’ll boot him around
To me way, hey-y, blow the man down.
Ah, blow the man down, and we’ll boot him around
Oh, give ‘em some time to blow the man down
William Doerflinger: That hitch was generally introduced then towards the end of the solo lines by the shantyman?
Patrick Tayluer: By the shantyman.
The above passage mostly speaks for itself, but I’d like to note the implicit distinction made by Tayluer between “working harder” and “pulling harder.” By making this distinction, he shows Doerflinger’s dichotomy between getting more work done and relaxing to be a false one: the shanty can help you pull harder, but that’s not necessarily “working harder.” In fact, you might say that sea shanties demonstrate the modern proverb “work smarter, not harder”: by coordinating all the men’s pulling, and giving them something amusing to think about while doing so, the shanty is helping them work smarter, achieving more productivity, while also making the task seem easier.
The last issue we’ll look at is probably the thorniest discussed by Doerflinger and Tayluer: the origins both of the word “shanty” and of sea shanties themselves. Tayluer believed both the word and the type of song came to British and American sailors directly from West Africa, specifically from a group he called “the Kru boys.” “Kru,” Krou,” or “Kroo” was the Europeanized name of an ethnic group from West Africa. But as the U.S.S. Constitution Museum tells us, by the mid-19th century “the term Kru grew from describing a specific ethnic group to a unified term for West African mariners and workers from a variety of ethnic groups who were serving on European and American ships.” These “Kru men” or “Kru boys” were highly skilled and valued members of the crew; during the time Patrick Tayluer was growing up in the 1850s, about 100 West African sailors served in the U.S. Navy aboard USS Constitution, helping combat the illegal slave trade as part of the Africa Squadron.
It’s unfortunate that Tayluer used the term “Kru boys” instead of the more respectful “Kru men,” but I don’t believe he meant to belittle them; note that in the song we heard at the beginning, Tayluer calls all the working sailors “boys,” and this is true in other songs and interviews as well. With that in mind, let’s hear Tayluer’s theories; the audio is in the player below, and you can read the transcript after that.
William Doerflinger: Where would you think that the word shanty originated, captain?
Patrick Tayluer: Well, it has been disputed several places. Some say that it came from here, some from there. But I think the real shanty is the native word from Sierra Leone down to Sekondi [Ghana], known by the Kru boys as shanta, which means work together and pull together.
William Doerflinger: They sing shanties down in those parts.
Patrick Tayluer: They sing shanties to everything that they do. If it’s only pushing a little bit of thing along, they’ll sing to it. And they all work together.
William Doerflinger: You’ve been down along that coast, of course.
Patrick Tayluer: oh yes.
William Doerflinger: Have you ever questioned the natives about their shantying customs?
Patrick Tayluer: Oh, yes. One day I was in Matadi up the Congo [modern Democratic Republic of Congo], and I sit down alongside of a very old native there, and I asked him:
How comes the Kru boys always shanty everything?
Ah, no shanty, boss. Shanta.
Shanta! Well, where did this word shanta come from?
Well, boss, you know, long, long time ago, this word shanta passed from one people to the other, and so we grow up and we learned it from one people to the other. My boy, when he grew up, he sing it when he worked. His boy, when he grew up, he sing it when he worked!
Ah, I see then originally the shanties came from your songs called the shanta!
Yes, boss.
William Doerflinger: Did you get the idea that the songs had been handed down from generation to generation there too?
Patrick Tayluer: Their songs, in their own way of singing? The Kru boys? Yes, I believe that they had been handed down from generation to generation. And there is no doubt that the merchant seamen of Great Britain and America, they took the idea from them, and they arose shanties to sing to pulling and hauling on ropes, which made it a lot easier for them and for the crew.
Patrick Tayluer’s belief that shanties were derived from African traditional singing may seem surprising, but it really shouldn’t. As I pointed out in this previous post on sea shanties, the centrality of African-descended people to the shanty tradition is recognized by scholars but often forgotten in popular culture. Some of the most reliable sources on shanties tell us that often the most valued singer onboard a ship was a black sailor, and we can hear the connections shanties have with field hollers and other land-based work songs that African Americans knew. Stan Hugill, the last professional British shantyman we know of, learned many of his songs from black West Indian shipmates known to their friends as “Harding” (from Barbados) and “Harry Lauder” (from St. Lucia). Joanna Colcord, an American whose father was a ship captain and who grew up onboard tall ships, wrote in her 1924 book Roll and Go that “American Negroes” were “the best singers that ever lifted a shanty aboard ship.” James Madison Carpenter, writing on October 30, 1938 in the New York Times magazine, wrote: “Chanteymen were naturally quick to press into service aboard ship the Negro gang-work songs- with their droll fun, languorous cadences, and well-worn rhythm.” Frank Bullen, one of the only early English collectors who had himself been a working sailor, wrote in Songs of Sea Labour (1914) that “the great majority of these tunes undoubtedly emanated from the negroes of the Antilles (West Indies) and the Southern states.”
One of the earliest articles on shanties, published in 1858, just two years after Tayluer was born, made a very similar suggestion to his. Isaac Allen, who had sailed along the West African coast some 25 years before Tayluer did, wrote in “Songs of the Sailor” (available as a pdf at this link):
“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. […] And here I cannot help noticing the similarity existing between the working chorus of the sailors and the dirge-like negro melody. […] Strange as it may seem, however varied the appearance and nationality of the ship and its crew, be they from Archangel’s icebound coast, or India’s coral strand, Saxon or Celt, Frenchman or Turk, Russian or African, we invariably find that the strain of the sailor’s worksong has the same plaintive minor key, strongly reminding one of their similarity in this respect to the sad-toned melodies of the negro race.”
Tayluer’s specific theory about shanties coming directly from West African work songs probably can’t be proven. Current scholarship suggests that the West African roots of the shanty took hold also in ports like Mobile and New Orleans, and that the shanty’s adoption by deep-sea sailors probably involved contact with shore-based African American workers. But it’s also true that Africans, Black Americans, and Europeans met and mingled on ships, and that the West African work song may have been a direct influence on the early shanty tradition.
In any case, Tayluer’s theory is broadly consistent with observations of generations of students of the shanty. Those observations tell us that the sea shanty is closely related to the songs of African-descended workers on land and sea, that sailors of African descent were often renowned as the best shanty singers aboard ship, and that shanties closely resemble the singing of oarsmen and other workers from West Africa.
Given this, it’s appropriate that shantying survives among African descendants today. In some small areas of the Caribbean, subsistence whaling from shore-based boats is still allowed, and in some of those communities men still sing while rowing. Some of their songs are versions of the same shanties Patrick Tayluer sang. The tradition was revitalized in the early 2000s, and a singing group from the town of Barouille in St. Vincent toured the world through about 2015.
Some of these same shore-based whaling shanties are in the AFC archive, collected by Alan Lomax with the help of Roger Abrahams in 1962. Lomax recorded and photographed a group consisting of Reginald Syder, Franklin Skeete, Walter Roberts, Reuben Morris, and Roy Gumbs. One of the songs they sang demonstrates the staying power of the deep-sea shanties Patrick Tayluer knew, while also confirming his observations on the importance of Black sailors to the shanty tradition. We’ll have more about Patrick Tayluer in later posts, but for now let’s give these African-Caribbean maritime workers the last word, singing their version of “Blow, Boys, Blow,” the same shanty you can hear above in Tayluer’s 1942 recording.