The Sailor's Song (Child 289)

What I sing here is mostly what Dan Tate of Fancy Gap, Carroll County, Virginia, sang to Mike Yates on August 14th, 1979. Mr. Tate was a banjo player and singer, born in 1896, who Mike Yates met on the first of his Appalachian collecting trips. You can find out more about the music he recorded here.

I have to admit that the ballad has “evolved” unconsciously in my hands since I learned it from the Dan Tate recording, in that the characters should be introduced in turn as “the next on deck….” etc., whereas in singing “the next to come in” I seem to have got muddled up with an English mummers’ calling-on song. Be warned not to learn it my way! More deliberately, I amended the second verse (which in the Tate version has the lady making an identical speech to the captain’s) in line with the wonderfully-spirited version recorded by Ernest Stoneman from Galax (just up the road from Fancy Gap) with his family band. My arrangement is a more conventional old-time / bluegrass effort than the Stoneman recording.