Shoals of Herring (I)

DESCRIPTION: "Oh, it was a fine and a pleasant day, Out of Yarmouth harbour I was faring" on a ship seeking herring. The young sailor learns that it is hard work and a hard life: "Just to earn your daily bread you're daring." He earns his pay in his years of fishing
AUTHOR: Ewan MacColl
EARLIEST DATE: 1960 (source: Palmer-OxfordBookOfSeaSongs)
KEYWORDS: fishing sailor hardtimes money
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Palmer-OxfordBookOfSeaSongs 154, "The Shoals of Herring" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, SHOALHER*
Roud #13642
NOTES [430 words]: Palmer claims that this has gone into tradition in Ireland, but he offers no evidence, so I have not listed it as being found there. It is from Ewan MacColl's radio ballad "Singing the Fishing" -- technically the third of the radio ballads, but the first over which MacColl and Peggy Seeger had real artistic control.
According to Jean R. Freedman, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, Illinois University Press, 2017, p. 127, the tune of this is based on "The Famous Flower of Serving-Men" [Child 106], with words inspired by Sam Larner. A better argument for traditional status may be the fact that Larner, upon hearing MacColl sing the song, said "I've sung that song all my life."
MacColl himself recalled this slightly differently. His autobiography, Journeyman: An Autobiography, re-edited and with an introduction by Peggy Seeger, 1990; revised edition, Manchester University Press, 2009, p. 313, records Larner saying, "I've KNOWN that song all my life."
This is one of the best-known, if not the best-known, of the Radio Ballad songs, but MacColl had a lot of trouble with it. His autobiography, p. 312, says, "The writing of the songs [for "Singing the Fishing"] took me about a month, or maybe a little longer.... I wrestled with the ideas for 'Shoals of Herring' for over two weeks. Nothing came right. Every time I sat down to write, the economy and simplicity of the form I had chosen would elude me. When, finally, I hit the right note I completed the song in fifteen minutes."
Incidentally, the singer of this song refers to being a cook who had "a quarter share." An ordinary crewman had a single share in a catch. Others would have different numbers of shares (e.g. the captain usually had many shares). So a crew might collectively award, say 42.5 shares. When the fish were landed and valued, certain expenses would be taken out, and the total divided by the number of shares, and everyone would be paid based on the number of shares they held. As someone who held a non-fishing post, the cook -- like other specialists such as the carpenter if they had one -- may well have gotten some fixed pay as well (indeed, the whole crew might, which would reduce the value of particular shares), but the use of the share system generally induced everyone to try to increase the total haul of fish. This worked especially well on relatively small boats with only a few men in the crew; on something like a big Newfoundland sealer, with hundreds of men, one or two might still slack off. Of course, if they did, they generally weren't hired again. - RBW
Last updated in version 7.1
File: PaSe154

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