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CULTURAL NOTEBOOK
Music
“A song is worth ten men”, a seafaring saying goes. Sailors,
castaways, pirates and kings swinging with the Beach Boys
by Alberto Piccinini
here has always been music on
ships; the evidence dates back as far
as the ancient Egyptians, no less.
Trumpets and drums on military ships; rousing choruses on cargo ships; small orchestras for aristocrats and kings: music was
used to synchronize movement, keep morale high, and pass the time. With the advent of steamships, some of these sea
shanties became hit songs, and seafaring
music survives to this day, on cruise ships
and, for example, in the phrase “the band
played on”, a reference to the Titanic’s orchestra, which continued playing till it sunk
to its watery grave.
T
Water Music – Georg Friedrich Handel.
Commissioned in 1717 by George I of
Hanover, who had just been crowned king,
Water Music was composed for a 50-piece
baroque orchestra – minus a harpsichord,
for lack of space – that was installed on a
barge and made to sail down the Thames.
The king attended the concert from another
barge, in the company of a select group of
aristocrats. The sequence of the movements that comprise the three suites is not
set. For the first performance, Handel used
the slower movements when the orchestra
barge was closer to the king’s boat, and
the allegros when it pulled away.
Sloop John B – Beach Boys. Along the route
between Africa and the West Indies, slaves
and sailors sang work songs such as this
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one in chorus, in a typical ‘call and response’ style. The song tells the story of a
man and his grandfather who after a night
spent roaming around Nassau, drinking
and getting into fights, want to get back
on their sloop and go home. But their captain is drunk, as is the rest of the crew,
even the cook. Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded it in the Barbados Islands in
1935. In 1950, Pete Seeger and the Weavers
recorded a folk version, “(The Wreck of the)
John B” (although the song makes no mention of a shipwreck), which was covered
by Johnny Cash and Lonnie Donegan before the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson got a
hold of it, adding his own psychedelic
touch (“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been
on”) in the song’s best-known version,
which was featured on the Beach Boys’
1965 album, Pet Sounds.
Day-O (Banana Song) – Harry Belafonte.
The fate of this anonymous song about
Jamaican port workers was similar to that
of "Sloop John B". After loading banana
boats all night, a man asks the ‘mister’ to
tally up his load and pay him, because
“daylight come and me wanna go home”.
The 1950s calypso version became one
of the first hits by actor-crooner Henry Belafonte, who was among the first symbols
of a newfound African-American pride.
Il tragico naufragio della nave Sirio – Giovanna Marini, Francesco De Gregori “Ed a
bordo cantar si sentivano/ tutti allegri del
loro destin” (“They were heard singing on
board / All of them excited about their
destiny”). Just over a hundred years ago,
the SS Sirio, an Italian transatlantic
steamer that sailed from Genoa to South
America, met the same fate as the Costa
Concordia when it ran aground on the reef
of Cape Palos in Spain, three kilometres
from shore. The ship remained in the water for ten days, the prow jutting out of
the sea, the stern just a few metres underwater. But the violent force of the impact, the reigning panic, the rush for the
few lifeboats available and the explosion
Y Francesco De
Gregori in concert
Z Elvis Costello, the
stage name of Declan
Patrick MacManus, a
British singer,
songwriter, guitarist
and composer.
Z Britners Spears
during a concert in
2000.
ANGELO PALMA/A3/CONTRASTO
Maritime music from the
Pharaohs to Britney Spears
east global geopolitics
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MuSiC
The Sinking of the Reuben James – Woody
Guthrie. On 31 October, 1941 the US destroyer Reuben James was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Iceland as it
escorted a convoy of mercantile ships
bound for England. It was the first ship
the Allies lost in WWII. Guthrie virtually
wrote the song ‘in real time’, and originally wanted to include the names of all
100 sailors who lost their lives in the attack. But he settled on beginning the second verse with, “Tell me what were their
names/Did you have a friend on the good
Reuben James?” before reassuring everyone that “our mighty battleships will
steam the bounding main.”
ALEX VANHEE/HOLLANDSE HOOGTE/CONTRASTO
Shipbuilding – Elvis Costello “It’s just a
rumour that was spread around town”.
One of the worst fallacies of the Falklands
War of the early 1980s was the idea that
CONTRASTO
of the engine took almost 500 lives. The
version by De Gregori (who years earlier
had written the album Titanic) and Giovanna Marini, is a cover of the song by
folksinger Caterina Bueno, which was
based on the verses of singer-songwriters
of the era.
war would mean that the abandoned
shipyards of northern England would finally be reopened. Costello wrote it from
the point of view of the shipbuilders and
their moral dilemma: if the yards reopen,
the men may be able to buy “a new winter
coat and shoes for the wife” and “a bicycle on the boy’s birthday”. But is it worth
it? The song ends with: “Diving for dear
life when we could be diving for pearls”.
Recorded in two versions, one by Robert
Wyatt (in 1982) and the other by Costello
the following year (with Chet Baker on the
trumpet), it is considered to be one of the
most beautiful and moving songs of recent decades.
In the Navy – Village People. In 1979, the
US Navy lent the Village People an entire
aircraft carrier to shoot a recruitment ad.
number 51 january/february 2014
The resulting song came on the heels of
the enormous success of the previous
year’s ‘YMCA’. The Village People were,
of course, a notoriously gay disco group
who wrote sexy, tongue-in-cheek dance
music. This song was an enormous macho
double entendre, and the protests against
it were overwhelming. The recruitment
campaign was cancelled.
Baby One More Time – Britney Spears. According to the Guardian, the British Navy
plays Britney Spears songs full-blast to
intimidate pirate ships sailing off the eastern coast of Africa. Strange, but true.
Alberto Piccinini, writes about music, sports
and communications for Il Manifesto, Il Venerdì, Rolling Stone Italia and RAI.
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