Sea Songs from Two Oceans: A Comparative Analysis of Maritime Songs from the Coasts of Yorkshire and British Columbia

The 2010 International Ballad Conference was hosted by the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, which is the principal archive and research centre for the study of Dutch folklore and folk music, including balladry (narrative song). It was held between July 5th and July 10th, 2010, commencing at the Meertens Institute and then moving to the Willem Barentsz Maritime Institure on the Dutch island of Terschelling. The subject of the conference was balladry and shorter songs relating to water, including, of course, the sea. My paper was included in a session titled “Coastal Music Cultures,” chaired by Dr. Larry Syndergaard from Michigan State University. The other papers in the session were by English scholar Christopher Heppa from Chelmsford, the world expert on traditional singer Harry Cox, who presented on “An examination of the Importance of ‘Freshwater’ and ‘Saltwater’ Songs in the Repertory of the East Norfolk Traditional Singers, c. 1885-1970,” and Scottish scholar Valentina Bold from Glasgow, whose topic was “From the Farmlands of Balloway to the Lowlands of Holland: A Consideration of Martime Culture in the Ballads of South West Scotland.” My presentation, on “Sea Songs from Two Oceans: A Comparative Analysis of Martime Songs from the Coasts of Yorkshire and British Columbia,” was the last of the three in the session. It included a power-point presentation, in part for the convenience of scholars from Eastern Europe who were not completely fluent in the English language but whose comprehension would be enhanced by following the visuals. The powerpoint also gave me an opportunity of showing photopgraphs of the two folksong collectors whose work I was discussing, Frank Kidson and Philip Thomas, and of the geographical areas in which they collected songs, the North Yorkshire and British Columbia coastal communities respectively. Discussion after the papers centred mainly on surprising lacunae in the various collections, for example the very few number of songs about the Norfolk Broads compared with the quantity of sea songs in the repertoire of Harry Cox, and, similarly, the lack of fishing songs in the Kidson collection vis-à-vis the Thomas collection (in which they are abundant). Only one other (Canadian) participant in the conference was familiar with the Thomas collection of B.C. maritime songs, so most of the discussion involving my subject focused on parallels, implicit and explicit, between the Norfolk material presented by Chris Heppa and the Yorkshire material collected by Frank Kidson. I had not previously thought of making this comparison, although it now seems to me an obvious thing to do, so one of the benefits of the conference was to suggest this possible avenue of further research. Another useful suggestion was to analyse and explain better the different balance between occupational and non-occupation songs in the two collections. A third idea is to determine whether an analysis of water symbolism—a recurrent theme of many papers at the conference—would shed any light on the underlying meaning and function of any other ballads in either the Kidson or the Thomas collection; prima facie it would seem most relevant to the non-occupational ballads in Kidson. I am considering submitting a proposal to present a paper at the 2011 International Ballad Conference, which will be held in Portugal, and the evident interest in, by widespread ignorance of, Canadian traditional balladry among the scholars assembled at Terschelling, has encouraged me to consider an entirely Canadian focus for this presentation, although I have not yet made a final decision as to the precise topic.Yorkshire folksong collector Frank Kidson did most of his fieldwork during the last two decades of the Victorian era. The fruits of his labours during the 1880s found expression in his pioneering collection Traditional Tunes (1891) but the second volume that would have showcased his collecting in the 1890s was never published in the form he intended and the best source for his later fieldwork remains the several manuscripts held in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Kidson obtained maritime songs from source singers in both south Yorkshire (in and near the seaport of Hull) and the north Yorkshire coast from Scarborough to Whitby. The leading Western Canadian collector Phil Thomas did most of his fieldwork three-quarters of a century later, but his impressive collection of vernacular songs from British Columbia also includes a substantial number of martime songs obtained from source singers who made their livings on the coastal waters of the Pacific from Vancouver to Alaska. Part of Thomas’ collection was published in his Songs of the Pacific Northwest but much remains in manuscript or on tape. The goal of this paper is to compare the different kinds of sea songs found in these two relatively unknown and under-utilized collections. To what extent do we find parallels between the songs of fishermen, tug-boat men, and ocean-going sailors braving the gales of the North Sea and Atlantic and those of their counterparts working in the Strait of Georgia and on the Pacific Ocean? Do we discover very similar shanties, songs of fishing, and ballads about shipwrecks, or are the differences in time and geography so great that each region’s vernacular songs are quite different and unique? My analysis aims to detect and delineate similarities between these two song traditions as well as to indicate the characteristic regional features of each. In the process I hope to show why the Kidson and Thomas collections are both worthy of greater attention by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and ballad scholars