Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas -- Gerry Smyth, Paperback
Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas -- Gerry Smyth, Paperback
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Reintroduces the traditional sea shanty for a new generation
Passed down in the oral tradition and sung as working songs, sea shanties tell the compelling human stories of life on the water: hard labor, battling the elements, pining for distant loves and far-away homes. The music's rhythms are designed to galvanize the group effort of heaving, pushing, and pulling to weigh anchor, wind rope around a capstan, or set sail.
Acclaimed shanty devotee Gerry Smyth presents the background to each shanty alongside musical notation. The lyrics are elaborated upon with explanations of terminology, context including historical facts and accounts of life at sea, and the characters, both fictional and nonfictional, that appear in the songs from the great age of sail to the last days of square-rig.
Author: Gerry Smyth
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 08/26/2025
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9780295754154
About the Author
Gerry Smyth is professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University. The work of illustrator and printmaker Jonny Hannah has been featured in Vogue, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe and in the publication Greetings from Darktown.
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