ABSTRACT
As sailing ships were superseded by coal-powered vessels in the mid-nineteenth century, a wave of nostalgia for Britain’s golden age of sail swept the nation. For musicians, there was money to be made collecting, publishing, arranging and composing sea songs and chanties that evoked romantic images of adventure at sea, as well as rousing patriotic sentiments. However, the real-world experiences of maritime workers, along with the body of literature on sea songs and chanties that was simultaneously emerging in the Americas, sat awkwardly alongside the romantic and patriotic symbology that sea songs and chanties had accrued. As Paul Gilroy notes, sailing vessels of the early modern era were “micro-systems of political and linguistic hybridity,” a fact that resonated in the music that sailors used for work and leisure. A particularly contentious issue for collectors and enthusiasts of sea chanties in the early twentieth century was the role that black workers in the Americas played in shaping the genre. For those already committed to celebrating sea chanties as the soundtrack to Britain’s glorious maritime heritage, suggestions that the genre owed a debt to the African diaspora bordered on heresy, but for former sailors, like Frank T. Bullen, this was a simple matter of fact. At a time when English cultural nationalism was constructed around notions of the ‘English race’, sea chanties constituted what Deleuze and Guattari would call a ‘minoritarian’ influence, subverting the molar line that would be drawn around English national identity and English traditional music.
