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HEAVE HER UP AND BUST HER Lead: Richard

A capstan shanty from Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors, by Ivan H. Walton and Joe Grimm, 2002.

Ivan H. Walton was a professor of American Literature at the University of Michigan who nurtured his interest in folklore with studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. In the 1920s Walton decided to compile a bibliography of the extensive body of Great Lakes literature, some of which contained references to the singing of sailor songs. In 1932, with five hundred dollars in university money and some of his own, he drove off in search of songs that had been dying since before his birth almost forty years earlier. From June 23 until September 8 of that summer, Walton drove 2200 hundred miles around Lake Michigan seeking out lighthouse keepers, librarians, and, especially, retired lakesmen. He visited the remote Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan many times and, in 1938, he began making field recordings on wax platters with a primitive, suitcase-sized recorder. Walton made similar trips around Lakes Erie and Ontario in 1933. Despite dead ends and disappointments, Walton found many men who recalled hundreds of songs, in part or in whole. Walton died in 1968 and this book, representing a portion of his collecting, was finally published in 2002. The primary source for Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors is the Ivan H. Walton Collection in the Michigan Historical Collections at the University of Michigan's Bently Historical Library. The eighteen boxes that comprise the Walton Collection contain the correspondence, articles, recordings, class notes, travel diaries, musical scores, transcripts, clippings, lyrics, background, notes, lists, and jots that make it the richest collection of Great Lakes chanteys in existence.

Professor Walton met one of his best informants, retired sailor Robert Collen, at a Chicago sailors' union hall. At one of their first meetings in 1932 Collen pulled from his coat pocket a handful of songs on assorted pieces of paper. Thumbing through them, he half talked and half sang a number of old songs, some from the shore and some from the sea. Some, he said, he had learned in 1880 during his first trip on the ocean as an apprentice seaman. He had, as a boy, run away from home and shipped on an outward-bound Liverpool square-rigger. In the late 1880s he had worked his way on an Erie Canal boat from New York to Buffalo and then sailed on the Lakes until the schooner days ran out. "Steam-boatin' ain't no fit work for a real sailorman," he said. Collen stated that he sometimes acted as chanteyman on old Lake schooners "when der wan't no better one aboard." He explained in some detail that chanteys "ain't no regular songs," that crews sing the same regular choruses on all ships, but the chanteyman "just makes up the rest of 'em as he goes along," and he added that he couldn't sing one twice the same way if he wanted to, "so der ain't no way to write 'em down."

To "heave" a vessel up and "bust" her meant to wind in the anchor chain so as to draw the vessel directly up over the anchor, and then to pull it free of the mud holding it. Professor Walton points out that the verses of this anchor-weighing chantey reflect several themes popular among sailors. The first jokes about sailing ships being pulled around at the end of a towline; there is the familiar gibe at smoke-belching tugs; the sailor's image of himself as a ladies' man and the dig at soft landlubbers who had better chow and easier lives than the hardworking sailors.

The version of this chantey printed in the book is put together from verses supplied by Jim McCarthy, J. Slyvester, "Ves" Ray, and William J. Small, all of Port Huron, Michigan. The version I sing on this recording is a combination of some of the verses from the book and the version sung by The Boarding Party – they must have had access to some of the original material collected by Walton because their version differs from the one in the book. There was no tune for this song in the book and the melody I use is one composed by the late Jonathan Eberhart who sang with the The Boarding Party.

LYRICS:

Gather 'round, boys, now all hands
Chorus: Heave her up, lads, heave her high!
Lean and heave her, all who can
Chorus: Heave her up and bust her!

We'll say farewell to this fair town
We'll ship once more – she's outward bound

When we tow out and then let go
We'll point her nose from Buffalo

We take coal up or grain back down
And any damn load that can be found

The wind's nor'west and holding strong
Sheet 'er close, send her along

The girls are list'ning from the shore
Their welcome smiles we do adore

The girls, they wish we'd come ashore
An' it breaks their hearts when we pass their doors

The landlubbers sleep in their soft beds
While sailors are hauling to earn their bread

The landlubbers fill up on beefsteak and pie
While the grub they give sailors would make a saint die

Soon we'll leave the Lake Huron light
The stormy winds and sea to fight

Additional verses from the book not used on this recording:

The St. Clair River is thirty miles long
An' we'll set our canvas to this merry song

Up the river we sail on a towline breeze
Astern the Flats, ahead the big seas

The tug is belching fire and smoke
The line holds firm on the towing post