"Away, Love, Away": The Sea Chantey, or Shantey, For These Modern Times
O, say were you ever in Rio Grande?
O, you Rio!
It’s there that the river runs down golden sand
And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.
Then away, love, away.
O, you Rio!
Sing fare you well, my pretty young girl,
And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.
The chorus comes in strong, as it is meant to do, while the grandly resonant voice of Roger Abrahams carries the tune. To me, “Rio Grande” by the Fo’c’sle Singers (Folkways, 1959) is the most thrilling of all the thousands of sea chanteys from times past — and times present, for they are now proliferating wildly (one hates to even use the word “virally” any more) on TikTok right now, to general delight.
This is thanks, largely, to Paul Clayton Worthington, later known as Paul Clayton. He was the organizer and sometime frontman, along with his good friend Dave Van Ronk, of the Foc’stle Singers, and by 1959 a longtime collector and recorder of working men’s ballads of the sea. They were a sub-specialty for this son of New Bedford, who’d grown up by and on the Atlantic, and who loved the writing of Herman Melville, the diaries of long-dead sailors, and above all the lyrics of lads who had gone down to the sea in ships. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Clayton worked with Professor Arthur Kyle Davis and an English grad student named Matt Bruccoli, who’d later be one of the world’s leading scholars of F. Scott Fitzgerald, compiling a second volume of Davis’s celebrated Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Clayton’s field work in the 1950s was phenomenal: he moved into a log cabin that had a dirt floor, and neither electricity nor plumbing, about 20 miles from Charlottesville. With this as his base, he traveled deep in the hills with his guitar, banjo, and dulcimer, coaxing old souls to share with him their far older music, and playing it along with them. In 1956 Folkways released Clayton’s Traditional Ballads of Virginia, which is a record that, along with his sea chanteys, is one of the first to which I can ever remember listening.
Now New York Town is no place for me
O, you Rio!
I’ll pack up my trunk and I’ll go off to sea
And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.
Clayton was based in New York City part time, for recording purposes and as an integral part of the exploding Greenwich Village folk scene, when the young Bob Dylan arrived in town in 1961. He and Dylan became good friends; in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, Dylan recalls Clayton as “a scholar and a romantic with an encyclopedic knowledge of balladry” who “dressed in black from head to foot and would quote Shakespeare.” He also “sang a lot of sea shanties.” Dylan sang them too, as a young folk singer. He had learned them from Clayton before he met Clayton, back in the landlocked Midwest, where the great lakes like seas and the mighty Mississippi River intimated what sailing and whaling once were. John Koerner, of Koerner, Ray and Glover, let Dylan listen to his Folkways albums and learn from them: “Foc’sle Songs and Sea Shanties was one that I could listen to over and over again. This one featured Dave Van Ronk, Roger Abrams, and some others. The record knocked me out. It was full ensemble singing, hard driving harmonic songs like ‘Haul Away Joe,’ ‘Hangin’ Johnny,’ ‘Radcliffe Highway.’ Sometimes Koerner and I sang some of those songs as a duo.” It is exactly this ensemble quality, the hard-driving harmonies of sea chanteys, that I think is powering the current rage for the songs.
Now all you beachcombers we’ll have you to know
O, you Rio!
We’re bound to the southward and glad for to go
And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.
In her recent column on the Tik Tok sea chantey phenomenon for The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich writes about the menhaden fishermen of the Chesapeake Bay and their working chanteys, as they harvested the tiny fish made into fertilizer near places like Tangier Island, now sadly settling beneath rising seas. When I was a child, the boat to Tangier passed right by the menhaden plant; the smell made you gag, and stayed in your hair and clothes all day. As they did this hard work, all pulling together, the menhaden fishermen — like thousands of sailors before them — found communion and connection in the rhythms of these songs. “Haul on The Bowline” is the perfect example: that’s exactly what the men singing the chantey were doing, and the repetitions and togethernesses in the tune helped them synchronize the motion and get the work done more smoothly and faster. It’s this collectiveness we are missing right now, locked down and out of range, alone and scared and waiting for vaccines. Says Petrusich, “In a moment where we are looking for escape and communion wherever we can find it, #shanteytok, as it has come to be called, feels like a safe and welcome portal to anywhere but here.” Exactly. Shanteytok makes us all less alone. It not only gives us all the history that sea chanteys contain, all the travel to faraway places and romance of the sea, but more importantly, these days, it gives us the feeling of standing on old salt-stained planks, shoulder to shoulder with others literally in the same boat. Long may it wave, and sincerest thanks to Nathan Evans, the Scottish postman who set us out onto Shantytok’s bounding main.
I’d like to close, though, with tradition — and in homage to one lost in this pandemic. Early last year, too early, Hal Willner died in New York City of complications from covid 19. His loss, to all who love him, music, and kindness and good nature, is tremendous, and will remain so. Thank you, Hal, for the glorious sea-borne records you made in 2006 and 2012, respectively Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys and Son of Rogue’s Gallery. These two albums, which I think underlie the current craze, feature sea songs sung by everyone from Richard Thompson and Shane MacGowan to Johnny Depp, Dr. John, Patti Smith, Jenni Muldaur and Michael Stipe — because everyone loved Hal and showed up for him. Go listen to these records if you haven’t heard them before, friends, and if you have. They will make you feel better, and in good company. Here’s Bob Neuwirth, channeling Van Ronk, with “Haul on The Bowline,” from Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys (ANTI- Records).