Jamestown Homeward Bound: A Song History
"The Jamestown Homeward Bound" is a sailors' forecastle song found in the United States, whose verses tell of voyages to the Mediterranean and of a crew's longing for home.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives its earliest date as 1938, from the text and tune Joanna Colcord printed in Songs of American Sailormen.[1] It carries the Roud number 4700.[2]
William James Bennett, View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City, watercolor on off-white wove paper, ca. 1827. Sailing ships at an American port two decades before the Jamestown was built, shown for the subject.
According to Colcord, the ship in the title was not the Confederate gunboat Jamestown but an American sloop of war built in 1844, which the government lent to a relief effort for the Irish famine in 1847, though her own text of the song never mentions that voyage.[1] The Naval History and Heritage Command's ship history records that this Jamestown was launched at the Gosport Navy Yard, Virginia, in 1844, sailed from Boston on 28 March 1847 and reached Cork on 12 April.[3] The Ballad Index's notes doubt that the song is about that ship at all: Gale Huntington printed a version as "The Nassau Homeward Bound" that shares its opening line and final chorus without naming Jamestown, and the Index treats it as a general sea song attached to different ships in different sources.[1]
Jeff Warner recalls that his longtime partner Jeff Davis found the song in Colcord's 1938 book and that the two recorded it in the 1980s; later recordings include Ye Mariners All (2003), Danny Spooner (2014) and Warner again in 2018.[2] Aubrey Atwater includes it, in DAD tuning, in Song By Song, Vol. II, a book of dulcimer tablature for traditional songs, many with lyrics, published by Atwater herself.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Ballad Index: "The Jamestown Homeward Bound".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The 'Jamestown' Homeward Bound".
- Naval History and Heritage Command: "Jamestown I (Sloop-of-War)".
- Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
- Image: William James Bennett, View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City, watercolor on off-white wove paper, ca. 1827. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.