Mayne Singers

Resources

Where to go when this book runs out.

Reference recordings

The single most useful resource: hearing the songs done well by people who do them for a living.

  • The Longest Johns — UK quartet, the current gold standard for modern shanty arrangements. thelongestjohns.com. Listen to Cures What Ails Ya (2020) and Smoke & Oakum (2018) end-to-end. Their Wellerman started the 2021 viral revival.
  • The Shanty Crew — YouTube channel, @TheShantyCrew. Traditional arrangements, often instructional.
  • Stan Rogers — Between the Breaks…Live! (1979) — the live album. Barrett's Privateers, Mary Ellen Carter, Rolling Down to Old Maui. Count the audience voices on the chorus — that's the bar.
  • Great Big Sea — Up (1995)* and Sea of No Cares (2002) — the breakout albums. Donkey Riding, Old Black Rum, General Taylor*. Modern shanty band template.
  • Storm Weather Shanty Choir — Norwegian shanty band, multi-part arrangements, mixed voices. Different aesthetic from the British / Canadian schools, worth knowing.
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (2013) soundtrack — Sean Dagher arranged the shanties for this game. The recordings are surprisingly authentic and have introduced a generation of younger listeners to the form. Two full albums of source material.

Scholarly / historical sources

  • Stan Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas (1961) — the definitive scholarly collection. Out of print but findable used. Every working shanty in the English-speaking maritime tradition is in here, with provenance and variants.
  • Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1932) — the foundational collection of Atlantic Canadian maritime song. Where The Sailor's Alphabet and many others were first written down.
  • Maud Karpeles, Folk Songs from Newfoundland (1934) — the Newfoundland traditional canon. Includes She's Like the Swallow.
  • Edith Fowke & Richard Johnston, Folk Songs of Canada (1954) — the standard Canadian school-music collection from the mid-20th century. Many of these songs entered general knowledge through this book.

Online lyric and chord sources

  • The Contemplator's Folk Music Site — large public-domain lyric collection for sea songs and shanties.
  • Mainsail.ca — CBC Radio's maritime music program archives. Thirty-plus years of weekly shows.
  • The Mudcat Café — the long-running folk and blues forum. Searchable database of song origins, variants, and discussion. The single best place to ask "where does this verse come from?"
  • Traditional Tune Archive — reference for Irish, Scottish, and English instrumental tunes; useful for the whistle / mandolin players in the band.

Voice and singing

  • The Naked Vocalist podcast — technical, accessible, by working professional vocal coaches.
  • Cornelius Reid, The Free Voice (1965) — classic text on voice technique. Old but the anatomy hasn't changed.
  • New York Vocal Coaching — Justin Stoney's YouTube channel. Lots of practical exercises, especially for the male middle voice and the break.
  • A local voice teacher — the National Association of Teachers of Singing maintains a public directory. Three lessons with a classically-trained teacher is more useful than a hundred hours of YouTube.

Instrument resources

Guitar

  • Justin Sandercoe / justinguitar.com — the most thorough free guitar learning resource on the internet.
  • Tony Polecastro / tonypolecastro.com — especially good for folk and bluegrass fingerpicking.

Mandolin

Bodhrán

  • Eamon Murray — Irish bodhrán player; YouTube videos are essential. Type "Eamon Murray bodhrán" into YouTube.
  • Junior Davey — old-school style, deep on technique.
  • The Bodhran Forum — small but active community for player Q&A.

Concertina

  • Caitlín Nic Gabhann — Irish concertina player; her tutorials on YouTube are excellent for beginners and intermediate players.
  • Concertina.net — forum, tutorials, instrument reviews. The hub.
  • Anglo Concertina forums — subreddits and Facebook groups; specifically search for "Anglo concertina shanty" if that's your focus.

Penny whistle

  • Brendan Power — tutorials on YouTube, focused on Irish trad.
  • blayneychew.com/whistle — comprehensive online whistle learning resource.
  • The Online Academy of Irish Music (OAIM) — subscription, but the gold standard for serious Irish trad learning across all instruments.

Adding songs and editing the book

The book is a Flask app reading plain-text Markdown chapters and ChordPro song files. To add a song:

  1. Create a file songs/your-song-slug.cho (lowercase, hyphenated)
  2. Follow the ChordPro format — any existing song is a template:

``` {title: Song Title} {artist: Composer or Traditional} {key: D} {tempo: 110} {difficulty: beginner} {tags: shanty,traditional,public-domain} {video: youtube:VIDEO_ID}

{c: Practice notes for the band — key feel, dynamics, harmony cues.}

{start_of_verse} [D]Lyrics with [G]chords [A]inline like [D]this

{start_of_chorus} [D]Chorus [G]lyrics [A]here [D] {end_of_chorus} ``` 3. Refresh the homepage — the song appears, grouped by its difficulty tag.

To add a chapter: create a numbered Markdown file in content/ (e.g. 13_my_chapter.md). The first # heading becomes the chapter title. Files sort by filename, so the leading number controls order.

To edit the rehearsal manual: just edit the relevant .md file in content/. Refresh the browser. The app reads from disk on every page load.

The repertoire is roughly split:

  • Public-domain traditional songs — full lyrics included. (Most shanties; all songs collected pre-1928 under US copyright law; most Canadian traditional collections.)
  • Copyrighted songs — chord progressions only, with section markers and pointers to the official source. (Stan Rogers' compositions are still under copyright; modern arrangements by The Longest Johns and others are protected even of public-domain songs.)

If you add a song, respect the same distinction. Buy the songbooks. Support the artists. The whole tradition depends on people who chose to keep making this music despite there being no money in it.