Sailor's Alphabet: A Song History

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In "The Sailor's Alphabet" the crew run through their letters one by one and sing of how merry their life at sea is; the Traditional Ballad Index, which files it as Roud 21100, classes it as a capstan or pumping shanty and gives 1870 as its earliest date.[1] A. L. Lloyd thought most versions came out of the navy rather than the merchant service, and Danny Spooner has suggested that songs of this kind helped newcomers get to know a ship's gear.[2] Mike Yates places it in a wider family of alphabet songs kept by lumberjacks, bargemen, soldiers and sheepherders, and suggests such songs may owe something to nursery rhymes such as Tom Thumb's Alphabet, which dates from at least the early 1700s.[3] The Index notes that the sailor's version is identical in form to "The Logger's Alphabet," and it cross-references "The Bargeman's Alphabet" as well.[1]

Old photograph of sailors gathered on the wooden deck of a sailing ship beneath masts and rigging

Henry P. Moore, Deck of U.S. Ship Vermont, albumen silver print from glass negative, ca. 1863. Sailors on the deck of a sailing ship in the 1860s, shown for the shanty's setting; it has no connection to the song.

Collectors found it on both sides of the Atlantic, in the west of England, Ireland, the Canadian Maritimes and Newfoundland, and the eastern and midwestern United States; the Index also lists a 1939 recording by Leighton Robinson with three companions.[1] Captain Manus J. Bonner sang it to Ivan H. Walton in 1932, saying he had learned it as a common sailor in the 1870s, and his version appears in Walton and Joe Grimm's Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors.[2] In England Peter Kennedy recorded Billy Barber at Cadgwith in 1956, and Philip Donnellan recorded Sam Larner at his home in Winterton, Norfolk, in 1958 or 1959; according to A. L. Lloyd, Larner had learned it while working in the Lowestoft drifter fleet.[2] Revival singers followed, among them Ewan MacColl on A Sailor's Garland in 1962, Fairport Convention on Babbacombe Lee in 1971, and Stan Hugill, who sang it as "The Bosun's Alphabet."[2]

Neal Hellman includes it in Mountain Dulcimer Arrangements From Both Sides Of The Atlantic, a Fingers Of Steel book of 35 mountain dulcimer arrangements whose download also includes each song as a separate PDF.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Sailor's Alphabet"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Sailor's Alphabet, The".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Sailor's Alphabet".
  3. Musical Traditions: "A's for the Anchor" (Article MT230).
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Neal Hellman, Mountain Dulcimer Arrangements From Both Sides Of The Atlantic".
  5. Image: Henry P. Moore, Deck of U.S. Ship Vermont, albumen silver print from glass negative, ca. 1863. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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