For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song about fishing, a mariner, sailing, seafaring, or ships, which he tells us in his post There She Blows! is to mark the 175th anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick. Anyone who has read my posts before will know where this will take me: yes, it’s sea shanty time! My favourite live band – Bellowhead – has several of these in their repertoire so I thought I’d play you a couple of those.

Starting with this one:

That was Roll Alabama and the lyrics – if you need them – can be found with my old friend genius.com.

Bellowhead have been around since 2004. They broke up in 2016 but reformed in 2020, spurred on by their friendship during the pandemic. I have lost track of the times I’ve seen them in concert – it must be at least eight or nine – and they are fantastic. Superb musicianship is matched with a high level of fun, and everyone leaves their shows feeling that they have been well-entertained. They are an eleven piece band, and play a mix of traditional dance tunes, folk songs and shanties, with arrangements drawing inspiration from a wide range of musical styles and influences. A little unusually for a folk band they have a four member brass section and a drummer, which adds a lot to their style.

Roll Alabama was included on their fifth album, Revival, which was released in June 2014 and reached #12 in the UK. The song is an American-British sea shanty of the nineteenth century, based on the exploits of the CSS Alabama, a sloop-of-war of the Confederate States Navy which enjoyed success as a commerce raider against Union shipping during the American Civil War. The lyrics describe the ship from its construction by John Laird of Merseyside until its sinking at the Battle of Cherbourg in June 1864. The words were set to the melody of the older song Roll the Cotton Down which originated amongst black longshoremen in southern ports of the United States. The Alabama was a long way from home, having travelled across the Atlantic to France for some much needed repairs. The Battle of Cherbourg was a single-ship action fought between the United States Navy warship, USS Kearsarge, and the  CSS Alabama, on June 19, 1864, which resulted in the sinking of the Alabama. The song is catalogued as #4710 in the Roud Folk Song Index, a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, compiled by Steve Roud, a British teacher and historian.

My second Bellowhead tune for today is this one:

As you probably gathered, that was called 10,000 Miles Away, and the lyrics can, of course, be found at genius.com.

Bellowhead’s version of the song was on their fourth album, Broadside, which was released in October 2012 and got to #16 in the UK. As you can see, they had a lot of fun making their video for it, and it rather sums them up: their concerts always had a slightly anarchic feel to them with their humour to the fore, but that took nothing away from their musical abilities.

The song is included in the Roud Index as #1778, and is a sea shanty and bush ballad whose writing and composition are attributed to Joseph Bryan Geoghegan (c. 1816 – 1889), who was manager of the Star and Museum Music Hall in Bolton, Lancashire. A bush ballad, by the way, is a song depicting life in the Australian outback, or ‘bush.’ It has been passed from singer to singer as a traditional shanty, and the figure of “ten thousand miles” no doubt refers to the distance between England and Australia, and the separation of the lovers arises because the singer’s lover has been transported, for unspecified crimes. Several of the text variations make this more explicit, and the one used by Bellowhead involves that as a major part of the story.

I said I’d play two tunes for today, but I can’t resist a third, as this is a favourite in live performances and I have seen them play it several times:

For once this one has beaten genius.com, but songlyrics.com came to my rescue.

Known variously as Haul Away, Haul Away For Rosie, and Haul Away Joe, this is another to be found in Steve Roud’s Index, at #809. Bellowhead have never recorded a studio version of it, though it has been a major part of their concerts and has been included on a couple of live DVDs, both of which I have. It has, however, featured on an album by Spiers and Boden (i.e John Spiers, the melodeon player, and Jon Boden, lead singer and fiddler) on one of their duo releases. The album was called Bellow, and was released in 2003: I think it gives a huge clue as to the origin of the big band’s name!

The song is what is known as a short-drag sea shanty, which was used by sailors for tasks that needed a quick, heavy pull. It is part of  the 19th-century United States maritime repertoire, though it was widely known among sailors on this side of the Atlantic too. It had a wide range of verses, some of which were much cleaner than others. Bellowhead have always played it for a family audience: if you want to see some they didn’t include you’ll find them on the Mainly Norfolk site!

That’s my lot for today, and I hope you’ve had fun with these. My thanks as always to Jim for running the whole shebang, and for providing a theme which I enjoyed a lot. See you again for some more sweet Tuesday Tunes, I trust. Take care 🎶