1914. English Folk Chanteys with Pianoforte Accompaniment, collected by Cecil J. Sharp.
Of all these collections Capt. Whall's is the only one which a sailor could accept as authoritative. Capt. Whall unfortunately only gives the twenty-eight shanties which he himself learnt at sea. But to any one who has heard them sung aboard the old sailing ships, his versions ring true, and have a bite and a snap that is lacking in those published by mere collectors.
Davis and Tozer's book has had a great vogue, as it was for many years the only one on the market. But the statement that the music is 'composed and arranged on traditional sailor airs' rules it out of court in the eyes of seamen, since (a) a sailor song is not a shanty, and (b) to 'compose and arrange on traditional airs' is to destroy the traditional form.
Miss Smith's book is a thick volume into which was tumbled indiscriminately and uncritically a collection of all sorts of tunes from all sorts of countries which had any connection with seas, lakes, rivers, or their geographical equivalents. Scientific folk-song collecting was not understood in those days, and consequently all was fish that came to the authoress's net. Sailor shanties and landsmen's nautical effusions were jumbled together higgledy-piggledy, along with 'Full Fathom Five' and the 'Eton Boating Song.' But this lack of discrimination, pardonable in those days, was not so serious as the inability to write the tunes down correctly. So long as they were copied from other song-books they were not so bad, but when it came to taking them down from the seamen's singing the results were deplorable. Had the authoress been able to give us correct versions of the shanties her collection would have been a valuable one. The book contains altogether about thirty-two shanties collected from sailors in the Tyne seaports. Since both Miss Smith and myself hail from Newcastle, her 'hunting ground' for shanties was also mine, and I am consequently in a position to assess the importance or unimportance of her work. I may, therefore, say that although hardly a single shanty is noted down correctly, I can see clearly—having myself noted the same tunes in the same district—what she intended to convey, and furthermore can vouch for the accuracy of some of the words which were common to north country sailors, and which have not appeared in other collections.
If I have been obliged to criticize Miss Smith's book it is not because I wish to disparage a well-intentioned effort, but because I constantly hear The Music of the Waters quoted as an authoritative work on sailor shanties; and since the shanties in it were all collected in the district where I spent boyhood and youth, I am familiar with all of them, and can state definitely that they are in no sense authoritative. I should like, however, to pay my tribute of respect to Miss Smith's industry, and to her enterprise in calling attention to tunes that then seemed in a fair way to disappear.
Bullen and Arnold's book ought to have been a valuable contribution to shanty literature, as Bullen certainly knew his shanties, and used to sing them capitally. Unfortunately his musical collaborator does not appear to have been gifted with the faculty of taking down authentic versions from his singing. He seems to have had difficulty in differentiating between long measured notes and unmeasured pauses; between the respective meanings of three-four and six-eight time; between modal and modern tunes; and between the cases where irregular barring was or was not required. Apart from the amateur nature of the harmonies, the book exhibits such strange unacquaintance with the rudiments of musical notation as the following (p. 25):
A few other collections deserve mention:
1912. The Espérance Morris Book, Part II (Curwen Edition 8571), contains five shanties collected and arranged by Clive Carey.