Page "Sea shanty" Paragraph 68

Even while the proliferation of soft-scholarly books was reifying the shanty repertoire, a few American scholars were audio-recording some of the last surviving sailors that had sung shanties as part of their daily work.

Robert Winslow Gordon, founding head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, recorded sailors singing shanties in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1920s.

He later made recordings of African-American work songs in Georgia and elsewhere, and sought to demonstrate correspondences between these and the shanty genre.

Even more prolific in collecting shanties was James Madison Carpenter, who made hundreds of recordings of shanties from singers in Britain, Ireland, and the north-eastern U. S. in the late 1920s, allowing him to make observation from an extensive set of field data.

Neither of these scholars had the opportunity, however, to publish major works on shanties.

Similarly, Alan Lomax's work starting in the 1930s, especially his field recordings of work songs in the Caribbean and Southern U. S., makes a significant contribution to the information on extant shanty-related traditions.

Lastly, William Main Doerflinger carefully recorded and collected shanties from singers in New York and Nova Scotia in the 1930s and 1940s, the result of which was his Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman.