Three Sea Captains: A Song History
"The Three Sea Captains" is a tune in 6/8 time, usually played in G major, that Irish dancers use for a set dance of the same name.[1][2] The melody is considerably older than that title: the Traditional Tune Archive reports that Aloys Fleischmann traced it to John Lee's Collection of Country Dances for the Present Year 1791, printed in Dublin, and that it turned up again in 1799 in McGoun's Repository of Scots and Irish Airs under the name "Mr. William Clark's Favorite."[1] "William Clark's Favorite" still circulates as an alternate title, alongside "The Three Captains" and "The Sea Captains."[2]
Samuel Atkins, The Fleet Off the Coast, Beachy Head, watercolor, c. 1790–1805. A British fleet off Beachy Head around 1800, shown for the tune's title and the dancers' story of ships at sea; the watercolor has no connection to the tune.
A piece of dancers' folklore links the tune and its dance to the Battle of Navarino in 1827, when British, French and Russian ships fought the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets during the Greek War of Independence; on that reading the three captains are the allied commanders, and some dancers read the figures as the ships taking up battle positions, then wheeling round and coming back.[1] The archive treats this as folklore and points out that the music predates the dance, so any connection to the battle belongs to the choreography rather than to the melody's origins.[1]
Francis O'Neill printed the tune in both O'Neill's Music of Ireland and The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, and it also appears in the Roche Collection and in Allan's Irish Fiddler.[2] Among the recordings indexed on irishtune.info, the earliest is a 1932 disc by the Comerford Trio, with later versions from fiddlers Seán Ryan in 1967 and Eugene O'Donnell in 1978.[2] The tune has an English life as well, accompanying North-West morris dancing, and John Rea and Bill Spence each recorded it on hammered dulcimer in the late 1970s.[1] Mountain dulcimer players can learn it from Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1, the opening book of Mark Gilston's pair of Irish sheet-music collections, which counts it among its 41 tunes.[3]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Three Sea Captains (The)".
- Irishtune.info: "The Three Sea Captains".
- Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1".
- Image: Samuel Atkins, The Fleet Off the Coast, Beachy Head, watercolor, c. 1790–1805. The Cleveland Museum of Art.