Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor by Stuart M. Frank, and: The New Book of Pirate Songs by Stuart M. Frank (review)

Jolly Sailors Bold, an impressive volume, is the largest and most significant contribution to the publication and analysis of nautical folk songs in recent years. It will remind readers of Gale Huntington’s classic text Songs the Whalemen Sang (Dover, 1970), mainly because it uses a similar method. As did Huntington, Frank combed through sailors’ journals and ships’ logbooks to find materials that were known and enjoyed by sailors during the era of tall ships. Unlike Huntington’s songs, Frank’s materials were all located in a single large archival collection, the Kendall Collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where Frank works as the senior curator.

Jolly Sailors Bold presents 232 songs, poems, and tunes, some of them in multiple versions. They include seven sea chanteys or work songs, 19 fiddle tunes, and 206 songs and/or poems that would have been sung, read, or recited in whalers’ leisure hours. Among them are parlor songs, songs by Charles Dibdin and other celebrated writers, and other miscellaneous pieces, but the majority are traditional folk songs. Most are given as texts with separate musical transcriptions, and singers will need to figure out how the words can be made to fit the tunes. Each is given a narrative headnote giving Frank’s erudite and interesting observations on the histories of the texts and tunes. Each is also given an endnote detailing other publications of the song.

The book’s great value is exemplified in the entry on the classic whaling song “Rolling Down to Old Mohee.” In the excellent headnote, Frank gives a useful and accurate summary of the history of the song and its published versions. He identifies for the first time in print the sources of the two most common tunes to which revivalists have sung the song. He traces A. L. Lloyd’s tune to a piece adapted by Lloyd’s collaborator Ralph Vaughan Williams from a different folk song, demonstrating that the use of the tune for “Mohee” was almost certainly Lloyd’s innovation. He traces Stan Hugill’s tune (the most common one among revivalists today) to the earlier ballads “The Budgeon It Is a Delicate Trade” and “The Jolly Miller,” and suggests that, since Hugill was a bona fide sailor at the end of the age of sail, it may be the tune whalemen actually used for the song. He presents transcriptions of “The Budgeon” and Hugill’s tune to demonstrate the clear relationship between them. He then presents three versions of the song text, which show variations that should delight the hundreds of people who sing the song. To name just one, the line usually sung as “six hellish months we’ve passed away” is in one version rendered as “five sluggish moons have waxed and waned,” a vivid and evocative image. All this tells us a good deal of new information about a well-known song while clearing up the most common misconceptions. Frank’s expert research and writing do the same for many other songs, from well-known pieces such as “Lady Franklin’s Lament” to rarer items such as “All around the Room” and “I Am One of the Boys.” This ensures that Jolly Sailors Bold will provide a great deal of interesting information and hours of enjoyable reading for scholars and folk song enthusiasts alike.

Frank’s expertise is in nautical matters first and folk songs second, and in American sources more than British. Moreover, he sticks to tried-and-true sources such as Child, Bronson, and Laws, ignoring more recent...