Maritime Music History

Johnny Collins Dies (July 6, 2009) Johnny Collins was one of the signature voices on the maritime music scene since his beginnings in London jazz and folk clubs in 1956. He was a sought-after performer at many folk and maritime festivals. He and his friend, Jim Mageean, were cornerstone performers at the Liereliet festival in Workum for decades, their album “Coming of Age” documenting this accomplishment. He died on 6 July 2009 while on tour in Gdańsk, Poland, aged 71. Link to full article on Wikipedia.

Joanna Carver Colcord (March 18, 1882 – April 8, 1960) was pioneering social worker, and author. Born at sea, she was also notable for publishing texts on the language, work songs, and sea shanties of American seamen during the early 20th century. She is best known in the maritime music community for her 1924 book, Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen. Read the Wikipedia entry for Colcord here.

Ed was a well-loved musician in the folk music community. He appeared on over 40 recordings, most of them with Folk Legacy Records, now part of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. His discography includes 4 solo records, 11 as a trio with Gordon Bok and Ann Mayo Muir, and countless recordings with other artists. Despite persistent pressure early in his academic career to give up music and focus exclusively on psychology, he remained steadfast in his commitment to doing what he loved on his own terms. Musicians in the folk community cite his influence as an interpreter of songs who always put the song first, filling in harmonies without becoming the centerpiece. [From his biography.]

Albert Lancaster Lloyd, usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Wikipedia Born: February 29, 1908, London, United Kingdom Died: September 29, 1982, Greenwich, United Kingdom

Don Sineti , folksinger, songwriter, part-time sea chanteyman at historic Mystic Seaport Museum (with one of the most powerful voices on the Eastern Seaboard!), and long-neck, 5-string banjo picker, is also an award-winning marine mammal illustrator with a number of prestigious exhibitions and books to his credit. For over twenty years, he has combined his exhaustive knowledge of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) with his boundless energy, to deliver rousing renditions of songs from the days of wooden ships and iron men, alongside his own compositions dedicated to saving whales and the degraded marine environment. With a booming voice and a hearty laugh, he shares his music, his art, and his unrestrained love for the whale with audiences of all ages. Don Sineti passed away on 5 Jan 2023 after an extended illness.  Memories of his larger-than-life presence is being honored by the entire maritime music community.  His Hartford Courant obituary can be read here.

On this date in 2014, Hythe folk singer Kerry Hearn died in a crash on the A20 in 2014.  He was a member of the folk music band, Quidnunc.  He left behind his loving wife, Mandy Hearn and musical partner Stewart Pendrill. Read the newspaper article here.

Louisa Jo Killen (born Louis Killen; 10 January 1934 – 9 August 2013) was an English folk singer from Gateshead, Tyneside, who accompanied themself on the English concertina. Killen formed one of Britain’s first folk clubs in 1958 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and became a professional folk singer in 1961. In the 1970s Killen recalled: “When I started Folk Song and Ballad in Newcastle in 1958 there weren’t twenty folk clubs in the whole country, and when I left for the States (in 1966) there were maybe three hundred.”[2] Recordings of Killen singing some Tyneside songs were included on both The Iron Muse (Topic Records 12T86, 1963) and the revised version on CD (Topic Records TSCD465) issued in 1993. The accompanying book to the Topic Records 70 year anniversary boxed set Three Score and Ten has a dust jacket picture featuring Louis with Frankie Armstrong and the one of the songs featured on both albums of The Iron Muse, The Blackleg Miners is track six of the sixth CD in the set. Link to full article on Wikipedia.

Richard Terry was born in 1864 in Ellington, Northumberland. At the age of 11 he started playing the organ at the local church. Educated at various schools in South Shields, St Albans and London. In 1881 Terry was living in Jarrow and working as a Pupil Teacher. Terry then spent seventeen months as a non-collegiate person at Oxford (October 1887 to May 1889) and two years at Cambridge (1888–90), where he went as a non-collegiate student but became a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. There he also became a music critic for The Cambridge Review. At Cambridge, he was much influenced by the Professor of Music, Charles Villiers Stanford and the King’s Chapel organist Arthur Henry Mann who taught him the techniques of choral singing and the training of boys’ voices. In 1921, in an obvious departure from his church music, he edited the Curwen edition of ‘The Shanty Book (Part 1)’. The foreword was written by Sir Walter Runciman, acknowledging that the time of the shanty was over, along with sail-powered merchant ships. Terry’s ‘Introduction’ gives an excellent insight into the shanty as the sailor’s work song, deferring to the well-known shanty collection by Capt. W.B Whall ‘Sea Songs, Ships and Shanties’ (1910 & 1912), above other accounts written between 1887 and 1920. The collection of 30 shanties also includes explanations for their use at sea, and his extensive comments give us a deal of valuable information about a particular aspect of social and maritime history. Read the complete story on Wikipedia.

Albert Lancaster Lloyd, usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Wikipedia Born: February 29, 1908, London, United Kingdom Died: September 29, 1982, Greenwich, United Kingdom

By the spring of 1877, the English light-opera team of W.S. Gilbert and Richard Sullivan had established a strong reputation based on several well-received earlier works, but they had yet to have a true smash hit. That would change on May 25, 1878, when Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore premiered at the Opéra-Comique in London, beginning a near-record run of 571 performances in its original production. Gilbert and Sullivan began work on HMS Pinafore in early 1878 on the heels of a moderately successful operetta called The Sorcerer. Pinafore would be their fourth professional collaboration after being brought together by the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, who built a theater and created his own opera company to stage their works. The story of Pinafore concerns a blowhard First Lord of the Admiralty who is thwarted in his attempt to woo and marry the beautiful young daughter of a British Navy ship’s captain due to her love for a lowly enlisted sailor. In typical Gilbert and Sullivan fashion, the plot reveals that the lowly sailor was, in fact, switched at birth with the ship’s captain, and is therefore of sufficient social standing to wed the no-longer-a-captain’s daughter. It was not just the topsy-turvy plot of Pinafore, but also its memorable score of satirical and sentimental songs— including “We sail the ocean blue,” “Now give three cheers,” “When I was a lad,” “He is an Englishman”—that made it so instantly popular with audiences. Read the complete article on History.com.

Stan Hugill (19 November 1906 – 13 May 1992) was a British folk music performer, artist and sea music historian, known as the “Last Working Shantyman” and described as the “20th century guardian of the tradition”. [Wikipedia] He first went to sea aged 16 in 1922 and spent 23 years on the high waves before retiring to land in 1945. He was the last shantyman to sail on the last British commercial sailing ship the “Garthpool”. His love of the sea never dimmed, in later life he became an instructor of an Outward Bound Sea School and a marine artist producing more than 250 oil paintings of ships and the sea. He also penned five books on sea shanties as well as appearing on radio and television. And he spoke numerous languages, he was fluent in Japanese and Spanish as well as speaking Maori, Malay, Chinese plus various Polynesian dialects. [BBC Liverpool] When laid up with a broken leg in the 1950s, he began to write down the shanties that he had learned at sea, eventually authoring several books and releasing several LPs of performances later in coordination with a Merseyside folk group called Stormalong John. Although “shanty” is also spelled “chantey”, Hugill used the former exclusively in his books. [Wikipedia] Jack [Coutts, a member of Stormalong John] remembers travelling to Krakow in Poland with Stormalong John and Stan, when the shantyman was in his eighties, and being in awe as he entertained an audience of more than a thousand young people. Stan died in 1992 in Aberystwyth in Wales. [BBC Liverpool]

James Henry Miller (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989), better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Dirty Old Town”. MacColl collected hundreds of traditional folk songs, including the version of “Scarborough Fair” later popularised by Simon & Garfunkel, and released dozens of albums with A.L. Lloyd, Peggy Seeger and others, mostly of traditional folk songs. He also wrote many left-wing political songs, remaining a steadfast communist throughout his life and engaging in political activism. Read the full article on Wikipedia.