Hog Eye Man: A Song History
The name "Hog Eye Man" belongs both to a sea shanty and to an old-time fiddle breakdown, and the Traditional Tune Archive suggests the two may have no musical connection.[1] In the folklorist A. L. Lloyd's view, the shanty, sung chiefly while working the capstan and well known to British sailors, most likely came from America, and its melody was written down in the 1860s; W. B. Whall dated the song to around 1849–50.[2]
“The deck of an American line-of-battle ship,” wood engraving, January 28, 1854 (detail). Marian S. Carson Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The title has more than one explanation. Several writers say a "hog-eye" was a kind of barge used on American waters in the mid-1800s, though accounts differ on where: rivers and canals in some, the California gold-rush trade in others.[1][2][3] The word was also slang with a sexual meaning, and the shanty's verses could be bawdy enough that early collectors such as Whall and Colcord declined to print much of the text; the Ballad Index points to "Sally in the Garden" as the clean counterpart of the song.[2][3]
The fiddle tune is old as well: the Tune Archive dates the "Hog Eye" title to at least the mid-nineteenth century and finds it as "Hog-Eye Jig" in Septimus Winner's Winner's Collection for the Violin (1853).[1] It is an A-modal breakdown, set in mixolydian by some writers and dorian by others, and was played in Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas.[1] Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers cut it on a Victor 78, Herbert Halpert recorded Lauderdale County, Mississippi, fiddler Stephen B. Tucker playing it for the Library of Congress in 1939, and Kentucky fiddlers Luther Strong and Bill Stepp played versions called "Hog-Eyed Man."[1] Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded Strong's version on October 18, 1937.[4] It is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[5]
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