More than 160 songs drawn from recordings and archives of Maine singers and collectors; powerful stories of sailing, fishing, storms, shipwreck, piracy, sea battles, and loved ones left at home. With lyrics, tunes, and historical notes,

White-winged schooners once dominated commerce and culture on the Great Lakes, and songs relieved the hours on board, but that way of life and its music ended when steam-driven mechanical boats swept schooners from the inland seas. Recognizing in the late 1930s, almost too late, that this rich oral tradition was going to the grave along with the last generation of schoonermen, Ivan H. Walton undertook a quest to save the songs of the Great Lakes sailors. Racing time and its ravages, he searched out ancient mariners in lakefront hospitals, hangouts, and watering holes. Walton reconstructed songs from one of the most colorful periods in American history, discovering melodies and lyrics to more than a hundred songs. With its stories, lyrics, musical scores by folksinger/historian Lee Murdock, and accompanying CD, Windjammers ensures that sailing chanteys that have not been heard for over one hundred years can be heard again and again far into the future.

Passed down in the oral tradition and sung traditionally as working songs, sea shanties tell the human stories of life at sea: hard graft, battling the elements, the loss of ships or pining for a lady on shore. Its pages decorated with hand-drawn or wood-cut illustrations from celebrated artist Jonny Hannah, Sailor Song addresses the current modern revival of sea shanties, and seeks to celebrate and to explore the historical, musical and social history of the traditional sea song through 40 beautiful, mournful, haunting and uplifting shanties. Acclaimed shanty devotee Gerry Smyth presents the background to each one alongside musical notation. The lyrics are elaborated with explanations of terminology, context including historical facts and accounts of life at sea, and the characters, both fictional and non-fictional, that appear in the songs from the great age of sail to the last days of square-rig. Where appropriate, a direct digital link is made to a shanty recording in the British Library Sound Archive.

In the old days when American sailing ships still plowed the seas, it was the custom of their sailors to enliven both their work and their leisure time with song. The songs they used were not, generally speaking, those current and popular ashore at the same period, but were traditional compositions of unknown date and authorship, growing as all folk-song does out of the needs and experiences of men. These songs of the sea have in every line of their verses and every bar of their music the distinctive flavor of seafaring. They are of equal interest to students of folk-lore and to those who love the memory of old days spent on blue water; and it is with both in mind that this work has been undertaken.

A rousing collection of the most memorable and feel-good shanties in maritime history.