For Christmas my brother-in-law gave me the most excellent Rogue’s Gallery CD. It’s two CDs of traditional pirate ballads, sea songs and chanteys performed by people like Lou Reed, Nick Cave, and Stan Ridgway. The packaging is great and the liner notes are a hoot. Truly a triumph of the physical CD. I’ve always wanted to do a post of nothing but sea chanteys because I’m twisted like that. But there were a couple of killer songs on the CD that weren’t chanteys that I still felt compelled to share with my loyal readers.

Nick Cave “Fire Down Below” (Traditional)
A chantey (sometimes spelled shantey) is a work song sung by sailors to help them keep a rhythm while they were doing things like raising the sails or pumping out the bilge. Thus the chanting you hear in this song. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “cursing like a sailor” this is what they’re talking about. Most definitely not work safe.

Gavin Friday “Baltimore Whores” (Traditional)
Most of the chanteys that survive today were written down during Victorian times and because of that most of them were cleaned up so as not to offend the tender sensibilities of the time. This one somehow managed to get passed down through the years with its salty lyrics intact. And for the record “drag your nuts across my guts” ranks up there with any of the timeless poetry of Homer or Shakespeare.

Martin Carthy & Family “Hog-Eye Man” (Traditional)
A hog-eye was a type of barge used on the canals and rivers of America in the 1850s. The deepwater sailors looked down on the captains of the hog-eyes. So a woman who wanted a hog-eye man was pretty skanky by nautical standards. And if sailors think you’re skanky you’ve reached the pinnacle of skankitude, sister.

I was looking around for dulcimer tablature for this song because it seemed like it would be big fun to play at the next big family gathering and I found a version that was not only much more obscene than this one but also stunningly racist. Seems like piloting a hog-eye must have been a profession that attracted freed slaves.

Ralph Steadman “Little Boy Billee” (Traditional)
Ah, how I love a good song about cannibalism. Apparently before 1885 it was considered perfectly acceptable to eat the cabin boy if you ran out of food. I don’t know if that was spelled out when you took the job.

This song is a little hard to listen to because Mr. Steadman sings every stinkin’ line twice. You get to a point where you just want to shake him and shout “I heard it the first time, what happened next?”

Loudon Wainright III “Good Ship Venus” (Traditional)
Now here’s a wonderfully filthy sailing ditty. It’s the kind of song where everybody has their own favorite verse. For me it’s a tossup between the one about the cabin boy and the one about the captain’s daughter and the eels. I was on a cruise ship on my honeymoon and I would have gone on many more cruises if that first one had been like sailing on the good ship Venus.