Overview
The Men of the Robert Shaw Chorale is included here in the Maritime Music Directory International not because this was an exclusively maritime-themed musical act, but because their CD, “Sea Shanties” was enormously popular in households in the ’60s and ’70s. The performance style of the Chorale was quite contrary to the authentic fashion of sailors on tall ships, but to families gathered around the hi-fi record player, this sound was pretty groovy.
The Robert Shaw Chorale was a renowned professional choir founded in New York City in 1948 by Robert Shaw, a Californian who had been drafted out of college a decade earlier by Fred Waring to conduct his glee club in radio broadcasts. — Wikipedia
The album is made up of 16 “shanty standards” that most maritime music festival goers would recognize today, with the possible exceptions of track 9, “The Shaver” and track 15, “The Drummer and the Cook”.
The Robert Shaw Chorale ceased operations with Robert Shaw’s move to Atlanta [in 1965]. Subsequent groups with which Shaw gave concerts and made recordings, apart from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, were the Robert Shaw Festival Singers, a group which operated mainly around Shaw’s summer home in France after his retirement as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director; and the Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, an Atlanta-based group composed chiefly of members of the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus. — Wikipedia