A Shantyman’s Farewell | Folklife Today

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!

The name “Patrick Tayluer” is known in 2025 for one thing: sea shanties. The publication in 1951 of William Doerflinger’s book, Shantymen and Shantyboys, ensured that sea shanty enthusiasts would always know of Tayluer; the book has remained a standard source for 75 years and probably will remain so as long there is interest in these songs. It mentions Tayluer prominently, gives a brief profile, and prints several of his best songs.

Tayluer’s current notoriety just goes to show how fragile and ephemeral an art like shanty singing can be. Tayluer had been profiled numerous times in newspapers, first in Australia in 1930 and 1931, then in dozens of American stories from 1932 until 1944, but not a single one of these articles mentioned the fact that he sang. They focused instead on his other hobbies, long-distance walking and model shipbuilding, and on his career as a soldier and sailor. If Doerflinger, an amateur collector who worked in publishing, hadn’t been on the lookout for shanties in 1942, or if he hadn’t found Tayluer at the Seamen’s Church Institute, or if Tayluer hadn’t consented to sing, or if Doerflinger hadn’t been able to convince Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress to loan him a disc recorder and pay Tayluer the equivalent of a thousand dollars in today’s money, there would be no record of Tayluer’s shanties at all.

Left: a man builds a model ship. Right: half-length portrait of a man, smiling. — Left: Patrick Tayluer in 1940. Publicity from the New York World’s Fair, which employed Tayluer making model ships. Right: William Doerflinger, ca. 1950. Publicity photo from E. P. Dutton & co.

Even once the recordings were made, Tayluer’s legacy was not secured: when he died six years after meeting Doerflinger in 1948, his prowess as a shantyman was still known only by a tiny handful of people: Doerflinger, Lomax, and a few staff members of the Library of Congress. World War II prevented Doerflinger from completing his book until 1951, which finally, and posthumously, made Patrick Tayluer a well known name among sea shanty enthusiasts.

An article I wrote in a 2008 issue of Folklife Center News helped to expand what we knew of Tayluer, but still people couldn’t hear his voice. This blog series, which draws on many sources I uncovered in the interveneing years, has continued the process of revealing and celebrating Tayluer’s artistry, giving people around the world the opportunity to hear a selection of Tayluer’s songs and stories for themselves.

Someday, we hope to place the entire collection of Patrick Tayluer recordings online. Until that time, though, we have one last song from Tayluer. For this session, Doerflinger brought in Karl Fahlstrom, another retired sailor living at Sailors Snug Harbor, to sing along with Tayluer on the refrains. As you’ll hear, Fahlstrom helps get Tayluer back on track near the end when he briefly has trouble remembering the song’s tune. (What are shipmates for?) The song is a true shantyman’s farewell, a song for weighing anchor, getting underway, and saying goodbye.

It also serves as a temporary farewell to our readers; we’re about to take a brief break from blog posts for administrative reasons, and expect to be back in mid-March 2025 with more great content from American Folklife Center collections.

Notes from the Doerflinger collection describe discs 17, 18, and 19 of the original collection. — Doerflinger’s note on Tayluer’s “Rio Grande” recognized the plausibility of Tayluer’s beliefs about the song’s history: “Note singer’s valuable comments.”

As usual, Tayluer had a story to go with this song, revealing where and how he thinks the song was created. In brief, he connects it to the “Baltimore clippers.” Now understood as smaller precursors to the later clipper ships, “Baltimore clippers” were often two-masted ships rigged as schooners or brigantines, employed originally in the Atlantic and Caribbean trade. Tayluer believes the song originated in the coffee trade, when Baltimore clippers ran down to the important port city of Rio Grande, Brazil, named for its river-like system of lagoons and tidal channels. As many old sailors did, he pronounces the town’s name “Rye-oh Grand.”

You can listen in the player below, and follow along in the transcript below that. Note that Doerflinger had to flip the disc during the song and missed a half-verse…that missing text is obvious from the context, so I added it to the transcript in square brackets.

Without further ado, let’s hear the capstan shanty “Rio Grande.” Farewell for now!

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Now this song was generally sung aboard of the Yankee clippers, of which you’ve all heared about, those little Baltimore vessels that used to run down to São Paulo for coffee and back to the United States. They used to run down to São Paulo and the Rio Grande in Brazil. It was a beautiful place, and the sailors used to love it. And the song was made up and sung by seamen all over the world. But really it was made up aboard of American ships–so-called, the American clippers or the Baltimore clippers.

Heave away, Rio! Heave away, Rio!
Singin’ fare you well, my bonnie young girl,
And we’re bound to Rio Grande!

“Then may I come with you, my pretty maid?”
Heave away, Rio!
“Oh, may I come with you, oh, my pretty maid?”
When you’re bound to Rio Grande!

Heave away, Rio! Heave away, Rio!
Singin’ fare you well, my bonnie young girl,
And I’m bound to Rio Grande!

“You can please yourself, young man,” she did say,
Heave away, Rio!
“You can please yourself, young man,” she did say,
Because I’m bound to the Rio Grande!

Heave away, Rio! Heave away, Rio!
Singin’ fare you well, my bonnie young girl,
Because you’re bound to the Rio Grande!

Now, when I can come to you with open arms,
Heave away, Rio!
Oh, when I can come to you with open arms,
When you’re bound to Rio Grande!

Heave away, Rio! Heave away, Rio!
Singin’ fare you well, my bonnie young girl,
And I’m bound for the Rio Grande!

God bless you, may I only hope for your hand,
Heave away, Rio!
God bless you, may I only hope for your hand,
When you’re bound to the Rio Grande!