Whales or Men? A Sea-Shanty Lyric Flip

I don't have much to add to the newly proliferating sea shanty discourse, but film critic Dana Stevens's astute citation of the London-Irish punk-folk stylings of the Pogues as a reference point after a segment on the sea-shanty craze on a recent Slate Culture Gabfest sent me back to their oeuvre, which included a fair amount of sing-along-able, shanty-like tunes of original and traditional vintage. As I've written in this space before, the Pogues' fierce take on this material was so convincing in its heyday that it made me question, perhaps belatedly, the authenticity of the default folk sound I'd grown up knowing and loving, which very often smoothed out some weird old music into earnest, four-square acoustic art songs, to the point that "folk" as a genre has literally come to mean quiet, Travis-picked guitar ditties. If you've even been within earshot of the Harry Smith recordings, just for starters, you know that the way folk music has often been presented by white folks since the 1950s is a pretty lie. (Yes, I recognize there have been notable exceptions galore.) The boisterous Pogues aesthetic is enough to make you think: Wouldn't the purported music of the people sound a bit rowdier and grittier than the Kingston Trio?

The difference wasn't just in sound, of course, but in attitude. When the Pogues covered Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town," for instance, they gave his lugubrious, sentimental ballad a joyously grotty edge. The difference was also in Shane MacGowan's lyrics, a jostling kaleidoscope of blarney, bravado, piss, and vinegar you would never hear from the mouths of the Limeliters. The lyrics were sometimes different even when they were covering folk standards, as on one of the quintessential whaling songs of all time, "Greenland Whale Fisheries."

I'd heard this tale of seafaring woe performed by Peter, Paul & Mary, a group that was formative for me even as I've second-guessed their aesthetic over the years, and I noted a crucial lyrical difference between the two renditions. In PP&M's version, a crew's heroic attempt to spear a whale ends in disaster for them, and a verse late in the song tells us:

Oh, to lose that whale, my captain cried,
It grieves my heart full sore
But to lose four of my gallant men
It grieves me ten times more, brave boys,
It grieves me ten times more!

Can you guess how the Pogues rendered this line? I think you can:

The losing of those five jolly men,
It grieved the captain sore,
But the losing of that fine whalefish
Now it grieved him ten times more, brave boys
Now it grieved him ten times more

When I first discovered this discrepancy some 30 years ago, it felt like a "gotcha" moment: Here was a generational difference writ large, between soft-headed Boomer hippies and clear-eyed Gen-X punks. I couldn't say for sure which version was historically truer, but I knew which one I preferred. Now, with the help of the internet, I can more or less settle the latter question: The original lyric, which dates as far back as a 1725 broadside, seems to have mourned the lost crewman over the lost whale; on the other hand, this version, purportedly from 1833, already flips the sympathies toward the more cynical take.

I've also been schooled on the supposed generational divide: The version that A.L. Lloyd recorded with Ewan MacColl, with the title "Sperm Whale Fishery," for the 1957 collection Thar She Blows! has the whale > men flip, as does the version released in 1963 by the Chad Mitchell Trio, under the title "The Ballad of the Greenland Whalers." That same year, Judy Collins and Theodore Bikel sang it at Newport with the whale > men lyric.

Indeed this now seems to be the way this song is sung by traditional troupes the world over, as evidenced by this rendition by the U.K.'s Exmouth Shanty Men, who bill themselves as "the original buoy band." However you make the song sound, its critique of power is now canon.

An important source for this post was here.