I was approached recently by a friend in Texas with a request for the words to an old shanty song, “Haul Away Joe”. \u00a0Here’s what I sent him — I hope it will interest a few others as well:<\/p>\n

Let me do you one better.\u00a0 That old shanty, also known as “Haul Away My Rosy”, has been one of my favorites since 1958.\u00a0 Therein lies a story:<\/p>\n

In 1958, I found an Lp of the Norman Luboff Choir doing sea songs.\u00a0 I was 17 at the time and was beginning to explore American and other folk songs, many of whose melodies I though were wonderful, along with the great stories that the songs told.\u00a0 Now, the choir did a great job with that song and many others, as a choir<\/em>. \u00a0But that’s only the beginning of the story.<\/p>\n

I had a “crazy uncle” who lived North of us in Berkeley and taught bio-chemistry at Cal.\u00a0\u00a0 He and his wife came to visit us, and I managed to drag out this LP to play for him.<\/p>\n

So my uncle leaned back and remarked, “Yes it’s a nice song.\u00a0 I wonder how it would sound if a sailor sang it . . .\u00a0<\/em>?” \u00a0 That annoyed me, no end.\u00a0 Here I had played a beautiful folk song for him but he wasn’t that impressed with this magnificent choir.\u00a0 His remark nagged at me for for several weeks . . . I couldn’t get it out of my mind.\u00a0 Finally, I visited our local library at UCSB and spoke with the librarian (remember, no Internet, no Google!).\u00a0 The librarian mentioned she had heard the the Library Of Congress might have some recordings of sea shanties.\u00a0 I wrote them and found that, for the sum of $3.98 + shipping, I could buy an Lp of collected folk songs including sea shanties.\u00a0 So I became the proud owner of the bright red vinyl Lp AAFS-L2, which included Haul Away My Rosy<\/em> by J.M. “Sailor Dad” Hunt of Marion, VA, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1941.<\/p>\n

$\""Sailor$ <\/a>
"Sailor Dad" Hunt<\/p><\/div>\n
Of course, there was a world of difference!\u00a0 So here is the song, done as a sailor would sing it<\/em>, except that it would be sung more slowly while they were hauling the topsails.\u00a0 Do me a favor and sing it to the credit of “Sailor Dad”.<\/p>\n
Click here for song: \u00a0HaulAwayMyRosy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Haul Away Joe” or “Haul Away My Rosy”: Choir vs. Sailor – a folk style comparison and a story of a backwards-looking quest for folk authenticity. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-ramblings"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/poY5E-4d","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluegrasswest.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}