Shanty singing and the Irish Atlantic: Identity and hybridity in the musical imagination of Stan Hugill

The shanty: A brief history

The shanty tradition with which most people are familiar today emerged at a particular time and from a very particular set of cultural, geopolitical and technological circumstances. This story has been told many times by many people since the practice emerged as an object of academic and folkloric interest towards the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, the ‘folk’ revival (of which the shanty formed a specialist strand) continues to be fraught with all manner of ideological and institutional difficulties. ² The following account, drawn in large part from existing ones (most centrally those of A. L. Lloyd and Stan Hugill himself), represents another contribution to the ongoing negotiation of a particular form of ‘folk’ music in terms of its authenticity and its contested function within a variety of critical, cultural and political contexts.

Most authorities acknowledge that whereas some form of co-ordinated singing has probably existed since prehistory, the modern shanty tradition only commenced after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (including their extended North-American theatre of operations) in 1815. ³ The way was thus open for the expansion of transatlantic trade and travel. This, in turn, necessitated the development of a particular type of sailing vessel – the large-capacity, high-speed, multi-masted deep-water vessel. All commentators are likewise adamant that the shanty singing that developed soon after the commencement of this commercial opportunity was practiced only aboard merchant vessels, for the British and American state navies operated according to a different system in which efficiency and discipline were based on the strict observation of a specialised system of signals, codes and protocols. Terry writes that shanties ‘were never used aboard men-o’-war, where all orders were carried out in silence to the pipe of the bo’sun’s whistle’. ⁴

Lloyd is in no doubt that ‘[the] modern form of capitalism that gave rise to the great shipping lines produced at the same time the striking body of primitive folk songs that we call: sea shanties’. ⁵ In a classic instance of reciprocal development, improvements in engineering fed into (and were fed in turn) by the opening of new markets, and having made no significant advances (in terms of size or speed) since the early modern period, ships suddenly became much bigger and much faster. Lloyd pinpoints the moment of ‘take-off’: it was in 1816 – the year after Waterloo – that:

Isaac Wright & Co’s Black Ball Line began their regular run between New York and Liverpool, sailing on the first of each month, irrespective of weather or amount of cargo loaded, twenty-three days for the eastward trip, about forty coming back. ⁶

Other ‘lines’ followed soon after: Swallowtail, Red Cross, Dramatic, Black Cross. ⁷ Tonnage and yardage increased throughout the middle decades of the century; more ships, more passages, more commerce. One thing that did not necessarily increase, however, was crew size. Fewer men working harder and longer made commercial sense, and this was as much a factor in the later period, when steam power began to dominate transatlantic travel, as it was in the earlier part of the century when the various ‘lines’ first entered into direct competition with each other.

Work on board the typical ‘packet’ ship following the routes between Britain and the Americas consisted in large part of a variety of hauling and heaving tasks – raising the anchor, raising and adjusting sails, pumping bilge water, and so forth. It was soon observed that sailors operated more efficiently when working to a rhythm that was sympathetic to the task in hand, and it was in this context that the benefits of the call-and-response, co-ordinated work song were recognised. These songs were ‘performed not for fun or feeling but as an aid to muscular effort’. ⁸ The shantyman who organised this activity took on a recognised role. A strong voice and an ability to improvise content could earn a sailor a bonus on top of his normal pay: ‘The importance of the shantyman could not be overestimated. A good shantyman with a pretty wit was worth his weight in gold. He was a privileged person, and was excused all work save light or odd jobs’. ⁹

Thus, a series of song forms emerged, each designed to expedite one or other of the onboard chores necessary for the efficient running of these bigger, faster vessels. Although a description of the precise correspondence between musical structure (in terms of line and stanza length, for example) and specific work task (hauling as opposed to heaving, for example) is beyond the scope of this article, Hugill describes two main types and their sub-divisions:

The capstan song and the halyard song. The capstan song was subdivided into: a) the windlass, or anchor capstan shanty, b) the capstan song, sung when doing a job-o-work other than heaving the anchor … The halyard shanty, used for hoisting sails, was subdivided into: a) long pulls; b) foresheeters; c) bunt-stowers … For pumping it was considered any old sea-song would do, so long as it had a good grand chorus. ¹⁰

Although Lloyd (referencing Hugill) points out that ‘tight categories are misleading’ (usually evidence of academic pedantry), he acknowledges that:

in the earlier, formative years of the modern shanty, the nature of the job in hand and the gestures needed to fulfil it were important, even decisive, in shaping the melody, rhythm, metre and tempo of the songs. ¹¹

There are, as one might expect, many forms of maritime music, including ceremonial drum-and-trumpet bands, music for dancing and other forms of entertainment. ¹² Besides the extensive canon of onboard work songs, nineteenth-century merchant seamen were also evidently fond, for example, of singing when off duty. These songs (ballads and other popular forms) are sometimes referred to as ‘forebitters’ (or ‘mainhatch’ songs on American vessels), with reference to the part of the ship where such sessions took place; and a great deal of time and thought has been devoted to defining the relationship between the forebitter and the shanty proper. The principle remains, however: the shanty was specifically a work song, identified (in terms of structure, length and other characteristic features) with the task for which it had been developed.

‘So’, Lloyd writes, ‘the practice of shanty-singing as we know it best emerged during the American-dominated packet-ships of, roughly, 1830–50, and it reached its peak in the British-dominated clipper-ship era of 1855–70’. ¹³ As a living reproductive tradition it was all but dead by about 1875 in the face of competition from steam. As soon as its demise was imminent, however, shanty singing began to attract the attention of folklorists and their twin obsessions with accuracy and loss. The spectre of authenticity has haunted shanty research ever since – the conviction that these songs could not truly exist outside the context within which they had first developed, and that even the most sympathetic attempt to reproduce the shanty without its natural environment was in some sense complicit with the modernising forces working to render the form obsolete. Terry represents perhaps the most intransigent of the commentators, frequently upbraiding various agents – ‘late’ participants in the shanty tradition, fellow collectors and ignorant landlubbers, for example – for their ‘perversions’ of the original practice. ¹⁴ At the same time, shanty research was implicated in a widespread revival that was concerned to commemorate a lost folk culture, and to define that culture in terms of its canonical scope (what it was), its constituent features (how it worked), and its ideological impact (what it represented in relation to various politico-cultural narratives). W. B. Whall, for example, wrote that ‘[The] packets are all gone, and so are the roaring, brutal dogs who sailed them … The real thing has gone for ever’. ¹⁵ The inclusion of elaborate musical accompaniment for his ‘versions’ does not seem to have concerned him. Boyes argues that ‘without the notional existence of the rapidly disappearing Folk, there would be no rationale for a Folk Revival’. ¹⁶ Hugill himself is unusual insofar as he by and large refuses to sentimentalise or elegise the ‘original’ practice, celebrating instead the survival of the songs in new contexts.

In terms of the characteristic themes of the shanty, it is difficult to generalise, as lyrics were often occasional and improvised. The more physically difficult the onboard task, the less sense required; ‘songs’ could descend into a series of grunts and nonsense images (some of them borrowed from ‘foreign’ languages such as Gaelic). Longer, more tedious tasks, on the other hand, could afford to be more expansive (both in structural and in lyrical terms) in order to engage the sailor’s attention as well as his effort. There is plenty of evidence, for example, of some of the heartier narrative folk songs (forebitters) being adapted specifically for work gang purposes. There was also a stock of ‘floating’ formulations (references to particular ports, officer types, food quality, women’s names, and so on), which could be readily adapted for any task at any time, all of which makes identification and categorisation extremely challenging.

More damagingly still from a scholarly perspective is the fact that most of the shanty lyrics were so sexually explicit that the earliest collectors could not see their way clear to committing them to paper. Even an old salt such as Stan Hugill danced around innuendo and refrained from citing words that he feared might offend his more delicate readers. Colourful characters coping with difficult circumstances was one thing, it seems; obscenity and indecency (as defined by late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century publishers) was something else again. The tone was set by Smith, an early contributor to shanty literature, who observed that ‘not a few of the songs … were highly objectionable on the score of morality’. ¹⁷ Thereafter every commentator has had occasion to reference the ‘colourful’ content of the shanty. Editorial intervention therefore played as important a role in the emergence of a shanty canon as it did in the formation of other elements of the ‘folk revival’. Gershon Legman deplored the ‘pitifully expurgated’ condition of printed shanty material. He also offered an explanation of sexual-emotional energies informing shanty discourse:

the psychological point is also very clear that the riotous obscenity of these songs also gives expression to the anger – in psycho-analytic terms the ‘anal sadism’ – of these men, deprived of all possibility of natural sex lives for long periods, during the fullest years of their virile strength: very hard-worked and in continuous danger and fear. ¹⁸

Authenticity is mitigated further still by the radical discrepancy between the original singing context (and the prevailing stylistic practices thus generated) and the various performance and stylistic contexts within which the shanty subsequently fetched up – everything from ‘authentic’ folk treatments to art song settings. ‘Some shantymen were bawlers’, according to Lloyd, ‘others used a delicate intimate voice. Some sang their solo lines in strict tempo, others preferred a rubato that at times … was quite elaborate’. ¹⁹ Harmony and ornamentation were unusual but not entirely unknown. Such considerations were somewhat beside the point, however – as Hugill complained: ‘[shore] singers of shanties rarely manage to get the right “atmosphere” into their offerings; they are not raucous or strident enough’. ²⁰ To which the frustrated singer/collector might respond: How raucous? How strident? Attempting to define the original style with reference to particular qualities or techniques is ultimately unviable: it was the context of imminent gang work that generated the specific aesthetics of the shanty, and that context was less and less available after the advent of steam. In his ‘Foreword’ to Sampson’s 1927 work, John Masefield offers advice as to a more authentic performance style (with soloist and chorus overlapping) whilst at the same time commending the author’s willingness to ‘soften’ the words ‘where necessary, as to fit them for the ears of ladies’. In his own ‘Preface’, Sampson reveals that he preferred to sing the shanties with piano accompaniment. ²¹

Many of the shanties also evidence a growing meta-discursive element in which the sailor reflects upon his own experience and practices (including the practice of singing itself). In this way, a discourse of marine-pastoralism was gradually overtaken by one of ironic realism. According to Lloyd, the later shanty material (c.1850–1875) reveals the seaman’s increasing awareness that he represented ‘an exploited floating proletarian rather than a proud if battered seadog’. ²² The onboard songs tell of ‘bully’ seamen and ‘bucko’ mates, the rigours of work and weather, the prowess of the ship and/or the line, and so forth; the port songs tell of pubs and drinking sessions, women (invariably false), and ‘crimping’ – the elaborate system developed worldwide to part the sailor from his pay and get him back to sea as quickly as possible. ²³

With regard to the derivation of these onboard work songs, Lloyd points out that:

the musical accents of [many places] went into the composition of the shanties … The melodies are a fine jumble of pentatonic phrases that may have derived originally from Gaelic or African culture, modal formulas from the English countryside, and modern commonplaces from stage hits of the first half of Victoria’s reign. Similarly the poetic improvizations of the shantymen are incrusted with bits of traditional imagery that first sparkled in the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Negro mind, along with tags invented by the yelping comedians of the time on both sides of the Atlantic. ²⁴

Hugill concurs, describing an eclectic range of sources and influences, including long-established hauling cries, dance tunes, folk songs and ballads (American and European as well as British), adapted art music, including custom-composed martial music of varying kinds; hymns, and popular songs. ²⁵ By far the two most important influences on the development of the shanty (and indeed the forebitter), however, were African-American sources (including work songs associated with the southern-American Gulf Ports, as well as West-Indian and Latin-American contributions), and, most consistently from Hugill’s perspective, Ireland. This leads us to a consideration of Hugill’s conceptualisation of the role of Ireland and Irishness in mid-nineteenth-century maritime culture in general, and in relation to the evolution of the modern shanty form in particular. The place to start such a task is in Liverpool.

Liverpool, Irish, Liverpool-Irish

History reveals that the notion of an authentic national identity is simultaneously underpinned and undermined by emigration. Those forced to leave can develop a strong investment in the ‘mother’ country, often (as in the case of Irish America) developing into some of the most sentimental and intransigent of nationalists. At the same time, the emigrants’ ‘original’ identity starts to erode immediately in the face of their spatial and psychosocial displacement. The emigrant embodies the paradoxical condition of modernity, strung out between past and present, there and here, absence and presence. Especially for the first generation of exiles, life is a constant negotiation between two equally pressing realities: one fully alive in memory, the other demanding of the here and now. Such a condition, I would suggest, also characterises the experience of the Liverpool-Irish.

There was a significant amount of traffic (both in goods and people) between Ireland and Liverpool after the latter received its charter from King John in 1207. That movement developed in size and significance during the period of the Atlantic archipelago’s increasingly fraught relations – including the Elizabethan plantations, the Cromwellian ‘settlement’, and the insidious colonial oppression that occurred in the wake of the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. As Britain’s imperial fortunes grew throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (a process in which Liverpool played a key role), the neighbouring island languished in political and economic stagnation – a provincial backwater populated by a benighted race whose image in the British cultural and political imagination oscillated between harmless childishness and bestial backwardness. ²⁶

Either as a transit port or as a final destination, Liverpool continued to loom large in the Irish imagination throughout the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. In 1841 (which is to say, before the Great Famine commencing in 1847) the city was already home to 49,639 Irish-born people – roughly one-seventh of the population. That figure was soon to rocket. Belchem quotes a local stipendiary magistrate who calculated that ‘296,331 persons landed at Liverpool from Ireland between 13 January and 13 December 1847, of whom 116,000 were “half naked and starving”’. ²⁷ Many more were to follow, as an Gorta Mór – ‘the Great Hunger’ – extended to the end of the decade and beyond. The majority of those fleeing the horror back in Ireland were passing through in search of better chances in a variety of far-flung destinations; exhausted and traumatised, however, many stayed where they fetched up, in the warren of streets that grew up around the docks, before slowly moving out into the burgeoning city itself.

It would be difficult to over-estimate the enduring influence of the Great Famine on subsequent Irish history. Amongst the many negative effects that historians and cultural commentators have discerned, perhaps the most enduringly damaging was the final loss (after a century and more of decline) of Gaelic as a viable national language, and the concomitant consolidation of English (or rather, a particular form of Hiberno-English) as the language of everyday Irish life. If this points, on the one hand, to the modernist experimentalism that was to characterise some aspects of Irish culture over the following decades, it also leads to a particular language usage that Irish emigrants brought with them around the world (including to Liverpool). Such a development was an important factor in the development of the modern shanty tradition.

A particular form of ‘Irishness’ emerged in the wake of the Famine exodus. It was formed of a combination of residual ethnicity, stereotyping by the resident population, and a useful ability to adapt to new circumstances; in Belchem’s words:

[Liverpool] ‘Irishness’ … was in part an imposed and host-invented stigma, but was also a creative response, an act of migrant self-imagination to facilitate adjustment to new surroundings. ²⁸

‘Scouse’ culture is frequently addressed with reference to this strong post-Famine strain of Irishness; and one of the most significant elements of that culture is music. As popular music historian Paul du Noyer puts it: ‘The Irish shaped many facets of Scouse character … but their greatest contribution was the view of music as one of life’s necessities’. ²⁹ Such a contribution tends to feature strongly in autobiographical accounts, such as Walsh’s Being Irish in Liverpool, in which music (along with Gaelic sports) is represented as central to the consolidation of a modern Liverpool-Irish community. ³⁰ It also feeds into more formal theories of the city’s musical identity, and the idea that ‘Irish immigrants have commonly expressed through music a longing for the people and country they have left behind and strong notions of home’. Such sentiments, Cohen suggests, have influenced the emergence of a particular ‘Liverpool sound’ associated ‘with images of river, sadness or grief, yearning and introspection’. ³¹

Whatever the truth of such a proposition (and it is highly contested), it seems clear that some notion of Irish identity features strongly in Liverpool’s self-image. ‘Emblematic of the Liverpool struggle against adversity, misperception and misrepresentation’, writes Belchem, ‘the Liverpool-Irish slummy was inscribed as the prototypical “scouser”’. ³² The Famine Irish contributed significantly to unprecedented levels of poverty, crime, drunkenness, disease and death in Liverpool; the moral outrage of the established population in the face of this apparent onslaught was considerable, and has continued to feed reactionary, betimes racist, discourses concerning immigration in general, and the Irish in particular, down to the time of writing. But the Irish also brought a great variety of attitudes and practices that have become embedded within the moral, political and cultural fabric of the city. There can be no doubt that the Great Famine was the defining event of modern Irish history – the basis of a recurring traumatic memory that profoundly influenced all subsequent developments, both in terms of the island’s political trajectories as well as its cultural identities. ³³ But it was also responsible for the consolidation of Liverpool as an indelible part of the Irish geo-cultural and psycho-spatial imagination – a development which in turn fed the notion of Liverpool as an exceptional city; a place apart.

Stan Hugill’s Irishman

Stan Hugill considered himself to be a ‘Liverpool man’; it was the port where he first took ship, where he was registered as a sailor, and (if the evidence of his work is to be credited) Liverpool remained at the centre of his imagination throughout his life. ³⁴ When he came to describe the great ‘sailortowns’ of the world, Liverpool took precedence over the likes of London, San Francisco and Hamburg. ³⁵ Growing up in a village near a great port that was so identified with Ireland and Irishness, it is perhaps not surprising that Hugill would have been primed to engage with the Irish elements in the social and cultural life of Liverpool – particularly insofar as they pertained to the musical and nautical elements which featured so strongly in his own experience.

This Irish influence may be observed throughout Hugill’s work in a number of respects. He suggests, for example, that a significant proportion of the international deep-water song repertoire (both proper shanties and forebitters) were of Irish origin:

[Many] shanties had Irish tunes – dance, folk, and march – and not only were the words and phrases of many of the shanties of Irish origin but in some cases it was customary for the shantyman to sing the shanties with an imitative Irish brogue. The Packet Rats of the Western Ocean Packets were almost one hundred per cent Irish, either from County this or that, or from Liverpool’s Scotland Road or New York’s Bowery and West Side, and as these seamen were responsible for many of our finest shanties it was only natural for them to choose tunes and words from Irish sources when they made up these songs. Nearly all the forebitters are of Irish origin and many of these were used as capstan and pump songs on account of their stirring choruses. ³⁶

Many of these songs incorporated macaronic Gaelic terms left over from their original language, and this underpinned another claim: that the shanties associated with traffic between Liverpool and the eastern-American seaboard were, irrespective of their provenance or of the singer’s ethnicity, usually sung in ‘an imitative Irish brogue’. ³⁷ Most tellingly, Hugill claims that Irish songs and melodies were subject to an ongoing ‘folk’ process in which they were adapted for use by different agents in a wide range of contexts.

What might be described as the ‘Irishification’ of the Atlantic trade routes commenced in earnest after the Famine, with crews culled from expatriate Irish communities on either side of the ocean. And with these crews came a particular repertoire of music, songs and performance styles – many of the shanties and forebitters that were to become canonical, well-known pieces such as:

‘The Liverpool Judies’, ‘Paddy Lay Back’, ‘Paddy West’, ‘The Banks of Newfoundland’, ‘The Liverpool Packet’ and so on, many of which were used as capstan shanties. They were responsible too for the following windlass, halyard, pumping and sheet shanties: ‘Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her’ (first sung as ‘Across the Rocky Mountains’ and ‘Across the Western Ocean’), ‘Blow the Man Down’, ‘The Blackball Line’, ‘Time for Us to Go’ or ‘A Hundred Years Ago’, and many others. Some of these forebitters and shanties have airs reminiscent of those of Erin’s Isle, and ‘Can’t Ye Dance the Polka?’ … unmistakeably has the air of ‘Larry Doolan’, a well-known Irish song. ³⁸

Hugill discerns two processes simultaneously at work, then: a growing Irish influence (in terms of repertoire and singing style), especially in the period after the Great Famine; and the hybridisation of that influence in the context of increasingly speedy, highly mobile, transatlantic trade.

The former process may be observed in relation to a song such as ‘The Irish Emigrant’ – also known as ‘We’re All Bound to Go’, described by Hugill as an outward-bound windlass shanty. With its jig tune and its story of a young Irish emigrant (sometimes male, sometimes female) in Liverpool looking for passage to the New World, this song, he avers, ‘is Irish to its very bones’:

As I walked out one morning down by the Clarence Dock,

I heard a bully Irish boy conversing with Tapscott;

‘Good morning, Mister Tapscott, would ye be arter telling me,

If ye’ve got a ship bound for New York in the state of Amerikee?’ ³⁹

This is a song is of a particular type – a narrative ‘come-all-ye’, identified in this instance by its characteristic opening line: ‘As I walked out …’. Lloyd suggests that this form emerged in Ireland in the eighteenth century, but came to prominence across Britain in the wake of the Great Famine, with the influx of Irish people into the great industrial centres. ⁴⁰ ‘The Irish Emigrant’ represents a typical adaptation of the form within a British – or more precisely, a migrant – context.

In this transcription, Hugill attempts to reproduce the sounds and locutions of an Irish accent. We find the word ‘Amerikee’, for example, scattered throughout the Anglophone shanty canon; along with the equally popular ‘Amerikay’, it was used for rhyming purposes, but also in hopeful imitation of an Irish pronunciation of the word ‘America’. Hugill also points out that the Irish pronunciation of the word ‘meal’ was responsible for the common misapprehension that emigrants travelled on ‘mail’ ships: Terry makes the same point. ⁴¹ Such words represent a particular form of language (Hiberno-English) that was at this time itself undergoing rapid change by language users who were negotiating the profoundly traumatic experience of alienation – both from the land of their birth and from the language of their ancestors.

We find a classic use (misuse, as it happens) of one of those locutions in line three of the verse quoted above, with the introduction of the word ‘after’ (or in this case, the more phonetic ‘arter’). Because there is no verb ‘to have’ in Gaelic, the perfect and pluperfect past tenses of ‘to have’ is formed with parts of the verb ‘to be’ in conjunction with the preposition tar éis – meaning ‘after’. So, in Gaelic, one might say: Tá mé tar éis mo dhinnér a ithe – which in Standard English would mean something like ‘I’ve just eaten my dinner’, but actually translates as ‘I am after eating my dinner’. ⁴² As Gaelic began to disappear, that particular locution became widely used in Hiberno-English; and as it did so, it becomes an easily reproducible way of invoking an Irish identity. Such is the manner, I believe, in which it is employed in this instance.

In fact, the locution is mis-applied by Hugill (or by his source) in this particular example. The Irish emigrant who is conversing with Mr Tapscott (an actual agent based in Liverpool in the years after the Famine) means to say something like: ‘Could you tell me if you’ve got a ship bound for New York’. There’s no meaningful sense in which the locution ‘after’ (or ‘arter’) might be employed in this context, other than for the purpose of invoking a stereotypical Irish identity, which is itself the pretext for the narrative. As such, it works perfectly well.

What occurs when someone imitates (or tries to imitate) an accent – especially when that accent is associated with one or another category of ‘otherness’ (race, class, nationality, for example)? With which values, abilities, assumptions or powers does such an affectation traffic? One might argue that it represents a form of mockery, of domination through the mechanism of the stereotype; and indeed, the history of British popular culture has no shortage of examples of ‘funny’ accents (including the Irish) being used in precisely this way. In this instance, however, there would appear to be a more complex process at work. Possible reasons for the prevalence of an Irish accent during the singing of shanties include: a) the large numbers of Irish merchant sailors emerging from Liverpool and New York during the mid-century decades, a process exacerbated by the Famine; and b) the provenance of the material itself – some of it, at least, gleaned from Irish emigrants (singing in their ‘natural’ accents) aboard the packet ships. There is another possible reason, however. For all their practical function aboard ship, shanties also connote a performative dimension, and this creates a space for the emergence of a variety of roles or parts which the singing subject may temporarily assume. For some sailors the adoption of an Irish accent could have been a means of stepping out of a present moment that was full of difficulty and danger, and adopting instead a provisional identity (Irishness) which possessed a range of stereotypical associations (drunkenness, belligerence, and an ability to cope with gruelling physical labour) that were extremely useful in the circumstances. I am suggesting, in other words, that the adoption of an Irish accent for the singing of shanties on the transatlantic routes during the nineteenth century connotes the performance of a role that was in some senses more amenable to the rigours of life under sail, and in terms of which one could ‘act’ out the required tasks.

In any event, Hugill’s work testifies to the presence of a strong Irish influence on the mainstream shanty tradition. That influence is, however, extremely impure in terms of its provenance and its scope; to introduce a term about which I shall have more to say presently, the shanty was a thoroughly hybrid form, incorporating musical, lyrical and performative influences from a wide range of sources. As an example of this process, Hugill cites the well-known shanty ‘Clear the Track, Let the Bulgine Run’:

Oooh the smartest packet ye can find

Ah ho! way-ho! are you mos’ done?

Is the ol’ ‘Wild Cat’ of the Swallowtail Line

Sooo, clear the track, let the bulgine run!

To me high rig-a-jig in a jauntin’ car

Ah ho! way-ho! are you mos’ done?

Wid Eliza Lee all on my knee

Sooo, clear the track, let the bulgine run!

The lyric of the most popular version cited by Hugill moves the action from Liverpool to New York and back again, finishing with a proposal of marriage to ‘Eliza Lee’. This shanty, he writes,

was a capstan song … a favourite in the Yankee packets. It has almost the same tune as an Irish folk-song Shule Agra but the refrains have wording showing Negro influence. It was another typical mixture of Irish and Negro sentiments and is one of the many shanties that passed through the shanty mart of Mobile, in this case I should think the tune came from Ireland to Mobile, where the Negroes took it in hand and then at a later date it returned to sea with a few more alterations. ⁴³

The ‘folk’ process Hugill proposes goes something like this: the ancient Irish song ‘Siubhail A Gradh’ (translating as something like ‘Walk On, My Love’) fetched up in Mobile, Alabama, sometime during the Famine emigration of the 1840s and 1850s. As with the process described in the previous section, the song may have been sung as a forebitter on the westward passage by expatriate Irish sailors, or the crew may have heard it being sung by the emigrants in steerage. In any event, the melody was adapted by African-American and Irish work gangs on the railroad network that was springing up in the great hinterlands in the years before the American Civil War. (‘Bulgine’ was a slang term for a railway engine.) These versions made their way back to the (fortuitously named) port of Mobile where one such version was picked up by American and British crews plying the Atlantic trade routes. This version was in turn adapted for a variation on the ‘flash packet’ genre, celebrating the speed and prowess of the ships operating under one or another of the transatlantic packet lines – in this case, Swallowtail. From ancient Gaelic love song to modern work shanty in a few easy moves! ⁴⁴

‘Clear the Track’ is not Irish, English, American or African-American; it is, according to Hugill, best described as ‘transatlantic’. ⁴⁵ His work is testament to the fact that the process described here in relation to this particular example operates at large throughout the shanty canon, as different aspects (melody, language, accent, lyric, structure, performance, and so on) of one (Irish) musical tradition mutate when confronted with new circumstances. But what does this mean? How may we begin to map the significance of songs which only emerged as ‘[freak] products of capitalism’, and only managed to survive as an academic curiosity – a ‘quoted’ folk form far removed from its original performance contexts? ⁴⁶ Most importantly from my perspective here, what are the implications of all this for a theorisation of modern Irish identity?

Theorising the Irish Atlantic

There are a number of methodological/theoretical perspectives from which the image of an Irish Atlantic (and in particular the role of the shanty in realising such an image) might be approached. One obvious such perspective concerns emigration, in all its political, historical, geographical, social and cultural contours. Especially since the Famine, the Irish represent one of the world’s great migrant races, discoverable in some or other form in various places across the globe. A related concept is that of ‘diaspora’ which, according to one authority, is ‘an interpretive frame for analysing the economic, political and cultural modalities of historically specific forms of migrancy’, offering ‘a critique of discourses of fixed origins while taking account of a homing desire, as distinct from a desire for a “homeland”’. ⁴⁷ Seen from this perspective, Irishness worldwide represents a classic ‘diasporic’ identity, located along a continuum running between strong affiliation (characterised, for example, by domicile in the ‘homeland’ and close identification with its ‘essential’ attributes, however conceived) to weak, multi-generational removal from the original migrant experience. ⁴⁸

The shanty might be regarded as a typical product of the diasporic imagination – a riposte to the powerful conceptual framework which maintains ‘a homology between a culture, a people, or a nation and its particular terrain’. ⁴⁹ But the sea is not a ‘terrain’, or, at least, only problematically so. Especially in its classic post-Famine phase, the shanty embodies experiences of displacement and alienation, of longing and loss, that are in themselves reflective of an Irish cultural tradition (inherited and remade by each generation) of large-scale, enforced economic migration. Which is to say: the perennial pattern of leaving and arriving that we noted in relation to the shanty may itself be a reflection of the diasporic imagination, in which experience is organised in relation to specific spatial co-ordinates identified as ‘home’ and ‘not-home’.

Migration and diaspora feature strongly also in one of the most powerful and most successful discourses to appear within the Western academy in recent years: postcolonialism. Researchers working under the auspices of postcolonial theory have reflected on the extent to which the dynamics of large-scale people movement has contributed to the ordering of the modern era, in particular its organisation into ‘regions’ or ‘worlds’ characterised by uneven cultural and economic development. ⁵⁰

One powerful concept that features strongly throughout postcolonial studies, and which bears closely on our concerns here, is ‘hybridity’. As theorised by Homi K. Bhabha, hybridity represents a way of evading traditional approaches to culture which, he claims, have always functioned in relation to a mode of enunciation whereby specific forms of unified discourse give rise to specific forms of unified subjectivity. Cultural analysis, he claims, has always been based on the fallacious assumption that meaning emerges as a function of the stable, transparent Self communicating with a stable, transparent Other through the medium of a stable, transparent language. Informed by a range of poststructuralist writers (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida), however, Bhabha advances an alternative notion of cultural enunciation – a ‘Third Space’ characterised by a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference:

The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. ⁵¹

Hybridity is the condition of all cultural production – for Derrida, it is embedded within the phenomenon of communication itself; but the hybrid status of the cultural text emerges most obviously in the context of enforced human intercourse – environments (such as those produced under colonialism and migration) in which apparently fixed, unified identities clash up against each other in a context of mutual exchange and influence.

The Irish Atlantic represents in this regard a classic ‘Third Space’ – an imagined location where the borders of identity (and the borders of those nations which supposedly produce such identities) are revealed to be porous, partial and provisional. This imagined location co-exists with others, equally imaginary (such as the Black Atlantic), equally compromised in relation to the fantasy of a fixed Self in whose image might be established viable discourses of culture or politics. In terms of its provisional status, its magpie aesthetic, and its resistance to established modes of textual analysis, the shanty stands perhaps as the principal aesthetic mode of the Irish Atlantic imaginary.

It is interesting to observe that during the 1840s, just as the shanty was consolidating in relation to the economic and cultural factors described earlier in this article, Irish society was negotiating a process of change in which issues of hybridity were also to feature powerfully. Such at least is the contention of David Lloyd, one of the most prominent critics to have brought postcolonial theory to bear upon Irish cultural history. Lloyd argues that after the trauma of the Famine, Irish cultural nationalism (in the form of the Young Ireland movement) dedicated itself to preparing the way for a properly realised political nationalism. Its principal strategy was the construction of a national epic literature – a body of work that would both embody and express the authentic essence of the nation. Such an epic would constitute the nation, becoming the core around which a broken people could coalesce, finding healing and ultimately the strength to throw off its British oppressor. The presiding style of the epic is a form of monologic discourse in which the text both replicates the nation which has been lost, and anticipates the nation which is yet to be. The text, in short, becomes the conduit through which the authentic nation is recovered and articulated in the present. ⁵²

One problem was that no such epic existed in fact, and that the material from which a modern version might be reconstructed was hopelessly fragmented. Irish history comprised a series of ruptures: Celts, Normans, Tudors, Cromwellians, Glorious Revolutionaries, with each successive wave of colonisation forcing its peculiar cultural and political imprint on the fabric of the island. The country’s literary remains bore witness to that process; it was a culture of fragments, and it became clear that any attempt at reconstruction would eventually resolve as an elaborate exercise in construction. Tradition, as always, needed to be invented rather than received or recovered.

Another problem was that ‘the people’ seemed uninspired by the search for a national epic (or for a style whereby such a text might be articulated). Instead, the increasingly English-speaking populace took to a form which, in terms of its (British) derivation, its recurrent themes (emigration and enlistment as well as rebellion and resistance), its (principally urban) milieu, and its (macaronic and adulterated) style, opposed the epic in seemingly every respect. This form was the street ballad, and according to Lloyd it became the principal target of Young Ireland critiques of the decadence of modern Irish culture, symptomatic of the nation’s inability to formulate an Irish identity worthy of the name.

The Irish street ballad emerged as a popular form during the early nineteenth century, and it was from the outset a thoroughly hybridised form. Although diverse in terms of theme and structure, the typical street ballad is characterised by a kind of ‘[tonal] instability’, making it difficult to decide its orientation in relation to the subject matter. ⁵³ Such indeed was the basis for the attacks upon it by those dedicated to expediting the nation through the means of a straightforward language articulating a straightforward message of national essence. The street ballad refuses the idea of appropriate style – the idea that certain languages simply belong to certain situations; instead, it tends to veer between various registers and perspectives, never allowing the listener to settle into a comfortable position from which to ‘process’ the message.

The street ballad was dismissed by the ideologues of Young Ireland as a fundamentally un-national (and thus undeserving) form – a distraction from the serious business of nation-building. For Lloyd, however, the street ballad represents a much more effective engagement with the politics of colonisation:

Self-consciously produced as commodities, and with the ephemeral aptness to momentary need or desire that is the property of the commodity, the street ballads often achieve an effect akin to montage in which the contours of an heterogeneous and hybridised culture can become apparent without necessarily losing political force. Indeed, a large part of the pleasure of the street ballad is political and lies in its use of ‘extravagant allegories’: what it exploits is precisely the unevenness of knowledge that characterizes the colonized society … The very inauthenticity of the colonized culture enables an unpredictable process of masking. ⁵⁴

Lloyd goes on to trace the afterlife of this ‘adulterated’ aesthetic throughout post-Famine Irish cultural politics, finding it especially evident in the modernism associated with the later fiction of James Joyce. It is interesting to note that Stan Hugill includes two references to the work of James Joyce in his contributions to the folk magazine Spin: the first to Joyce’s inclusion of a bawdy shanty entitled ‘First Came the Bosun’s Wife’ in Ulysses; the second to a letter from one of Joyce’s acquaintances inquiring about a bawdy American version of the shanty ‘Sacramento’. ⁵⁵ From the perspective of this essay, I discern many suggestive parallels and points of contact (and indeed contrast) between the street ballad and the shanty as products of a hybridised Irish culture. Each represents a highly contingent form of textuality in which traditional subject positions and narrative patterns are unavailable; each speaks to an identity strung about between centripetal and centrifugal forces; each is the product to some degree of a colonial history in which, despite a longing for plenitude and belonging, the abiding cultural forces are in fact fracture, displacement and alienation.

All the ideas broached in this final section – diaspora, hybridity, the politics of popular music – come together in Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, an influential book which proposed an alternative model of modern Western history based on the experience of the African diaspora. Gilroy’s radical strategy was to refuse ‘the unthinking assumption that cultures always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogenous nation states’, and to develop an alternative approach which would consider ‘the Atlantic as one complex unit of analysis – an explicitly transnational and intercultural [space]’. ⁵⁶ Such a perspective provided him with a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity, power and historical memory which have beset the Atlantic world since the nineteenth century, and which have fed so disastrously into what passes for the experience of modernity.

Crucially, Gilroy identifies the ship as the presiding symbol of this alternative history. Ships enabled people to move ‘to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity’. ⁵⁷ ‘Ships’, he suggests,

were the living means by which the points within the Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected … The ship provides a chance to explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of England’s ports, its interfaces with the wider world … the ship is the first of the novel chronotopes presupposed by my attempts to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere. ⁵⁸

Regarded in this way, the ship also links to one of the book’s key theoretical strategies: the differentiation between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. For Gilroy, the ‘rooted’ imagination has its bases in the European Enlightenment (including its American variation). In the realms of science and culture, it points towards a particular form of disciplinary knowledge, the force of which is felt in everything from the modern prison system to the development of the modern scientific taxonomies. The ‘rooted’ imagination also underpins the nation-state as the basic unit of international geopolitical organisation. The notion of ‘routes’, however, speaks to what Gilroy describes as ‘a rhizomorphic, routed, diaspora culture … a webbed network between the local and the global’. ⁵⁹ This is the ‘Black Atlantic’ – a space where the root, with its dogmatic drive towards order and system, is continually undermined by the caprice of the sea and the contingency of the ship.

The final and most suggestive element in Gilroy’s thesis is music. He argues that African music represents one of the most powerful presences within modern American cultural history, from the slave songs, spirituals and minstrelsy of the nineteenth century through the emergence of jazz and on to the great explosion of popular forms that has characterised American popular culture throughout the post-war era. Throughout all this activity, music has been routinely co-opted for a range of ideological tasks, the most recurring of which has been to represent (in the dual sense of standing in for and embodying) authentic African-American experience. Such a formulation causes problems, however,

particularly for those thinkers whose strategy for legitimising their own position as critics and artists turns on an image of the authentic folk as custodians of an essentially invariant, anti-historical notion of black particularity to which they alone somehow maintain privileged access. ⁶⁰

To the contrary, Gilroy claims that black vernacular culture reveals an array of ‘substantive interracial differences that make the easy essentialism from which most critical judgements are constructed simply untenable … black musical expression’, he goes on, ‘has played a role in reproducing … a distinctive counterculture of modernity’. ⁶¹ Here again we observe the contours of the ‘Black Atlantic’ – a concept deliberately set athwart received models of space/time (tradition, modernity, postmodernity), and set also against the modes of textuality that support and underpin those models.

It is my contention here that the shanty both partakes of, and contributes to, the formation of a counterculture that shadows mainstream institutional modernity, and that Irish music represents a seminal element within that process – more accurately, the interpenetration of Irish musical elements with an array of alternative lyrical, melodic and structural discourses including, most powerfully, music of African origin. The shanty is commercial, contingent, divergent, multiform, radically unfinished: a shipboard music born in the interstices of capitalism and diaspora, the shanty exemplifies a form of hybrid textuality that specifically expresses a form of hybrid subjectivity. This ‘routed’ process sets itself against the epic rootedness of the nation-state and its heroic mission to establish, and subsequently to police, the borders between things (places, times, experiences, identities).

The imaginary space of the ‘Irish Atlantic’ overlaps significantly with Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’; each inheres within the other, each forms part of the cultural and experiential matrix from which the other emerges as a theoretical possibility. ⁶² The significance of this possibility here lies in its resistance to a kind of narrow-gauge nationalism which came to define Irish identity in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and its location of modern Irish identity within a wider, transnational cultural space – one answering equally readily to the ocean and to the land; one alive to the risks of travelling as well as to the pleasures of inhabiting; and one which understands the necessary dialectic formed in relation to the images of home and not-home. With its endlessly adaptive hybridity and its willingness to hear the voice of the Other, the shanty provides us with an alternative genealogy of modernity – in short, a different narrative of the history within which we are still caught up.

Conclusion

It may seem a long way from Hugill to Homi – from the modest pleasures of shanty folklore to the political pressures of high postcolonial theory. And yet I believe that the one comes most sharply into focus in relation to the other. Hugill’s work is testament to the thoroughly hybridised nature of the emerging Atlantic world, and to the comprehensive infusion of Irish diasporic culture throughout that world. In one sense, the ambivalent space of the Irish Atlantic is produced as an effect of the rooted imagination itself – a kind of ‘supplement’ which, driven by the logic of international capitalism, must always exceed the places designed to contain it. In another sense, it speaks to a recurring possibility within cultural history itself; one that, although revealed and opened up by the recourse to critical theory, has profound implications for our practical political response to the modern world. As Bhabha writes:

[The] theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves. ⁶³