The Girl in Portland Street [54-55] (50-51)

fal-de-LOL!! You can always count on sailors to take an old song and make it bawdy and silly! To understand why, imagine the not only exhausting but also very boring drudgery of pumping out the ship. These were desperate attempts to take the mind off!

Now, Hugill names this "The Girl in Portland Street", while Harlow, who also gives it, just names it after its nonsense refrain, "A Fa-De-Lal-Day." For mostly intuitive reasons, the tune Hugill gives seems kind of off to me (for one, it is in simple meter) and so I chose to use Harlow's (compound meter) tune.

What Hugill does not note is that this seems to be a distant variant modeled on a common ballad theme, one which Child has (his #278) as "The Farmer's Curst Wife." Cazden et.al in their "Folksongs of the Catskills" cite ealier forms of this ballad, which they call "The Devil and the Farmer's Wife" (#137) in its American variants, from as far back as a 1630 broadside. Hugill does say that there was a shoreside variant of the song called "The Devil's Song," which he claims was especially popular amongst tinkers and Travelers!

Hugill was slightly incredulous about the whistled refrain, given by Harlow, but earlier versions (like Child's) customarilly have it, and it's what helped me make the connection. Harlow writes that, since the men kept cracking up at the song, they could hardly manage to pucker up and whistle! The silliness of course also comes in the nonsense refrain, which does vary greatly in its syllables from version to version (though again, this is an identifying feature). Following a hint by Harlow, I decided to interpret these parts, in the context of this chantey, as if they were cover-ups for funny or naughty bits (cf. the sea song "Do Me Ama").

The solos have absolutely nothing to do with the older ballads-- they are of the "anatomical progression" type (as Hugill calls it, after Cecil Sharp) which is like our earlier chantey, "A-Rovin'":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVmCbsMzHrE

So the chantey is a sort of hybrid of two old ballad traditions.

Like "A-Rovin'" the verses can continue indefinately in a bawdy direction. Hugill stops about 2-3 verses before me, but I also have a limit in this forum!

See the whole "Shanties from the Seven Seas" project, here:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=58B55DD66F22060C

Category:

Music

Tags:

• shanty
• chantey
• bawdy
• song
• ballad
• child
• farmer's
• wife
• a-rovin

[raymondcrooke]

Thanks for the video response. It's always interesting to look at the relationships between these old songs.

Another "anatomical progression" ballad is "Gently Johnny, My Jingalo," though not the version I sing. I only learned about the bawdy version when commenters complained that mine wasn't it!

[hultonclint]

Ah yes, Stan Hugill did mention "Gently Johnny..." too, elsewhere. Now I am officially inspired to check it out.