Henry's Songbook

[1951:] With the advent of the combustion engine and the eclipse of the sailing ship, the old shanties and sea songs have almost disappeared. These songs were sung by Shantyman and crew while they were dealing with the many ropes required for working their vessels. (PSB 53)

[1961:] A-rovin' was originally sung at the pumps and old-fashioned windlass. In both labours [...] two long levers were worked up and down by the men: a back-breaking job. These levers - in the case of pumps they were known as 'brakes' - had a long wooden handle inserted in their outboard ends, enabling three or four men to grasp each brake. Many shanties started life at the pump-brakes or old-fashioned windlass levers. Later, when ships began to use capstans with a large windlass below the fo'c'sle-head and iron ships began to replace wooden ones, thereby doing away with the arduous toil of pumping ship with monotonous regularity, watch and watch, these shanties were adapted for use at the capstan and more modern and not so often used flywheel or Downton pump.

Naturally in their conversion the tune and words remained unaltered, but the rhythm very often had to be adjusted to the new type of job. A-rovin' is, I feel, always sung much too fast by modern professional singers. The words 'A-rovin', a-rovin'' should be timed to fit the downward movement of a four-foot-diameter pump-wheel. The flywheel pump handles, like the old-fashioned levers, allowed only three or four men at the most to do the job, but in the case of the former, so that many more hands could be employed, a rope known as a 'bell-rope', with an eye spliced in one end, was looped over the end of each pump-wheel handle, and as the wheel was about to descend the men, first on one side and then on the other, would haul on the rope, lightening the toil considerably. [...]

A-rovin' appears to be of fair antiquity; some collectors state that the words are in, or bear certain resemblance to lines in, a song given by T. Heywood in his play 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1640). I have spent some time investigating this statement and have discovered that the song alluded to in Heywood's play is of the type known as a 'catch'. It is certainly not the shanty A-rovin', and the only thing that can be said about it is that the approach of Sextus to Lucrece bears some resemblance, in sequence, to that of the amorous seaman to his Dutch girl in the full bawdy version of the shanty. But then again this 'sequence' is to be found in other shanties and in folk-songs [...]

Some say the tune of A-rovin' is Elizabethan; this may be quite true, but as well as the shore folk-song found in Great Britain, Dutch, Flemish, and French versions of this tune exist. An English shore version collected by Cecil Sharp is We'll go no more a-cruisin'. And from being a song of fair antiquity it has within recent years reappeared over the radio as O Women! O Women! with a touch of the cowboy and hillbilly about it!

In all the versions sung by Sailor John the main theme was frankly Rabelaisian - 'coarse and indelicate words wedded to a haunting rhythm', as one writer has expressed it. In my version [20 stanzas, of which nos. 1, 4, 5, 15, 16, and 20 are used by the Spinners] I have tried to keep as much as possible to the story as it used to be sung at sea, bowdlerizing only at impossible places. The first six verses are unaltered, and in the subsequent verses I have kept the rhyming words at the end of each solo intact. This is the nearest attempt yet made to give the shanty as Sailor John rendered it. [...] In the chorus very often 'I'll' was sung instead of 'We'll', and other alternatives are 'roamin'' for 'rovin'', 'false maid' for 'fair maid', and 'overt'row' or 'downfall' for 'ruin'.

The last three or four stanzas are fairly modern. (Hugill, Shanties 44ff)

[1966:] Originally a pump and windlass shanty, and now a familiar sea-song/folk-song in many versions, some less polite and printable than others. (Notes 'Spotlight On The Spinners')