Bold Riley: A Song History
“Bold Riley” is sung today as a sailors’ farewell shanty, but its origins are uncertain.[1] It is absent from Stan Hugill’s Shanties from the Seven Seas (1961) and from earlier shanty collections, and its earliest known appearance seems to be A. L. Lloyd’s recording on A Sailor’s Garland, an LP he shared with Ewan MacColl, issued by Prestige International in January 1962.[1][2] In his notes Lloyd attributed it to sailors in the West Indies trade who brought songs home to Liverpool and Bristol, said the tune had begun as a Tobago reel, and described it being sung at the halyards of East Indiamen bound for Indian ports.[1] Later commentators have been sceptical: John Bowden and Sheafknot suspect that Lloyd himself may have written much of the song, and Nick Hart calls Lloyd “predictably vague about his sources.”[1]
James E. Buttersworth, Clipper Ship “Flying Cloud”, hand-colored lithograph, 1852. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An American clipper of the period, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
Fred McCormick has suggested that Lloyd’s version is based on a Georgia Sea Islands worksong called “Riley,” and the two songs share the Roud number 18160.[1][3] “Riley,” a shanty of alternating leader and response lines, was printed by Lydia Parrish as “Good-bye My Riley-O” in Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942) and recorded by Joe Armstrong, John Davis and the Georgia Sea Island Singers.[1][3] The verses Lloyd sang are stock lines that turn up in other shanties as well.[1]
Since Lloyd, “Bold Riley” has been recorded by many singers, among them Jeff Warner (1976), the Oyster Band (1986), Jim Mageean and Johnny Collins, and Kate Rusby, who learned it from Mageean and recorded it with Davy Steele on her first solo album, Hourglass (1997).[1] Performers shuffle its verses and alter the wording of the refrain, so its text is far from fixed, and the singer Ian Robb notes its recent popularity as a memorial song.[1]
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