Review by Alan Rose in Tykes Stirrings No.12: Summer 2023.
SHE SHANTIES have been raising rafters for more than a decade, but eleven busy women with eleven busy diaries mean that they don't get together that often. Nonetheless, this is their third recording, each titled for interesting bits of nautical nomenclature. The last album was called Futtock Shrouds; I'm sure you can see what they're doing on the CD title front.
Lubber's Hole has 12 tracks coming in at a smidgen over 35 minutes, an intelligent mixture of traditional shanties (which you would expect) and fine contemporary songs from fine contemporary writers (not so predictable). So there's John Connolly's Trawling Trade, Archie Fisher's The Final Trawl and Twiddles, written by our very own TS correspondent Janie Meneely as well as a lovely version of The Mingulay Boat Song (written by Hugh S. Robertson in 1938 it says here) which reawakens welcome memories of Grace Notes.
But of course, it's shanties they're named for and shanties that they do - and very well they do them. It's something of a conundrum that in many areas of this music that we love it is as enjoyable to actively take part as it is to passively observe - tune sessions are a case in point, and shanty sings are another. However, with the shanties on Lubber's Hole passive listening is not an option - from Johnny Come Down to Hilo through to Clear the Tracks, Let the Bulgine Run you'll be joining in at full volume, disturbing neighbours and pets in equal measure.
Inevitably, I'm going to list the participants - Bekka Bojanowski, Cath Tyler, Eilish Ferry-Kennington, Esther Ferry-Kennington, Freyja Boycott-Garnett, Kate Gessey, Rachel Hamer, Ruthie Boycott-Garnett, Ruth Price, Sadie Greenwood and Sally Gall. They are all great singers, and lead vocals are spread throughout the group, so as well as the aforementioned variety of material there is a refreshing array of vocal textures, and when all eleven pile into the choruses with their wonderful harmonies the result is nothing short of magnificent.
They obviously relish their joint endeavours, and the light-hearted touches in the CD sleeve notes indicate that they don't take themselves too seriously. Lubber's Hole is a worthy addition to the She Shanties' recorded canon, and an excellent way to hear the best of She Shanties in between their sensational gigs.
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Review by Nathaniel Handy in songlines August/September/2023.
The clue to the USP with She Shanties is in the name: women singing sea shanties. This is their third album, following in the tongue-in-cheek tradition of their previous nautically named releases, Spanker Boom and Futtock Shrouds. But there is something much less tongue-in-cheek about what they deliver.
One of the most brilliant signatures of She Shanties is that they sing songs sung by men without changing the lyrics. I hate the way lyrics are changed based on whether the singer is male or female – like that matters! In the same spirit as The Pogues, when Cáit O’Riordan sang ‘I’m a Man You Don't Meet Every Day’, She Shanties deliver them straight, and their music is all the more effective for it. Indeed, song ‘Bound to Australia’ carries the exact same chorus as O’Riordan's classic.
These are a mix of self-penned and traditional shanties, all a cappella and with solos that have a rough, raspy authenticity, such as on the wonderfully atmospheric and coarse ‘Old Moke’. They also make sensitive and astute reference to the origins of sea shanties in West African work songs brought to the Americas in the slave trade, and from there to the sailing ships of the 19th century – exemplified by ‘Johnny Come Down to Hilo’.
When you think of shanties, the image the usually comes first to mind is of a bunch of men, usually dressed in Arran jumpers, lustily belting out songs of a maritime persuasion, most popular known being Fisherman's Friends and The Longest Johns. The genre is not, however an exclusively male preserve, with such names as The Johnson Girls and The Norfolk Broads having made their mark. However, hailing from Whitby, this punningly named a capella crew are perhaps the largest ensemble, their eleven members outnumbering Fisherman's Friends by four.
This is their second full length album and, taking its title from a hole in a square-rigger's top near the mast through which one may go farther aloft without going over the rim by the futtock shrouds (the title, incidentally, of their debut), and comprises a mix of traditional covers and originals, kicking off the traditional capstan number 'Johnny Come Down to Hilo', eschewing the racist language of some versions but still referencing life on plantations, underscoring how many shanties are, as investigated by Jim Mageean and Angeline Morrison, are of Black origin. That applies to 'Old Moke' which has its origin among the Black and Irish navvies who worked the railroads, the version here, however, another capstan song learnt from Jeff Warner who recorded it as 'He Back, She Back (Old Moke Picking on a Banjo)' to a tune based on that by Watchet sailor John Short collected by Cecil Sharp, adapted, as the title suggests, for banjo (though not featured here), moke being a Romany word for donkey used as derisory term to describe someone as an ass, though in America it was applied to black slaves.
A familiar shanty chestnut, penned by Hugh S Robertson in 1938, they bring a wistful yearning to 'Mingulay Boat Song', the rhythm emulating the boatsmen at their oars as they rowed back to their Outer Hebrides home. Somewhat less known is 'Shawneetown' which, while it has a traditional feel, was written by Indiana songwriter Dillon Bustin in the 1970s, the first verse and chorus adapted from two separate fragments published in 1828, which he found in a 1969 book called The Keelboat Age on Western Waters. The title is a reference to the now abandoned town in Illinois, the lyrics speaking on rowing down to trade whiskey and wheat for rock salt, the line "we'll bushwhack her back" referring to how they would return upstream by thrusting a pole into the mud.
'The Trawling Trade' is also of more recent provenance, written by John Conolly from the McCalmans in 1973, about the fisherman returning home and having a few jars down the dockside. Likewise 'Twiddles 'was penned by the group's friend, Janie Meneely of the Misbehavin' Maidens and is playful number about what the sailor's wives get up to when the men are away and another ship sails in. Rather disappointingly, it's not the version featured on the Maidens' album Busted where the lyrics ("I know that you don't need a man to twiddle under there") are about self-pleasuring. Expanding the horizons, 'Essequibo River' is a call and response halyard shanty from Guyana, South America named for Venezuela's largest river and originally sung while stowing and moving shanty before being adopted by British and American crews.
First recorded in 1883, 'The Dreadnought 'is a forecastle shanty celebrating the American packet ship launched in 1853 as the flagship of the Red Cross Line, making 31 roundtrips from New York to Liverpool between 1853 and 1864 and is probably best known from Ewan McColl's 1953 version though, more recently cropped up on the Sea Song Sessions, here largely featuring just a solo vocal.
Recorded by everyone from The Clancy Brothers to The Dubliners to Bruce Springsteen, the jaunty Irish folk song 'Mrs McGrath' isn't a shanty as such, though it does relate the story of how a woman's son joins the British Army goes during the Peninsular War and returns seven years later having lost his legs to a cannonball while fighting against Napoleon.
It wouldn't be a shanty album if there wasn't one about emigration, here represented by 'Bound to Australia' (fittingly recorded by The Seekers), a drinking song originally collected from a former seaman at the Sailors Home in London the late 1880s and interestingly sporting the line "I'm a man yiz don't meet every day!" which many will know from the Scottish traditional covered by The Pogues.
Prolific in the 70s, Scottish singer Archie Fisher is the source of 'The Final Trawl' , recorded for his 2008 album Windward Away, inspired by seeing two trawlers rusting away outside a harbour in northern Scotland, beached there by the fishermen who could no longer make a living but didn't want to see then broken up for scrap, the women fully capturing the song's lament for the decline of the trade.
It ends with 'Clear the Track, Let the Bulgine Run', another number that found its way into the shanty canon by way of the railroads (bulgine being American slang for engine), learnt from the singing of Johnny Collins, who recorded it as 'Eliza Lee' (a reference to the narrator's sweetheart), though the main thrust is about the Margaret Evans, a 19th century steam packet of the Blue Cross Line.
The girls are out and about on the summer's festival circuit with appearances lined up at Cleobury Mortimer, Warwick, Towersey and Bromyard, you really should haul away and see them.