Music Video: "Our Captain Cried All Hands."

I heard this song from the wonderful band The New St. George in 1994 and fell in love with it. My kids and I had a family band called Flash Company toward the end of the 1990s and we performed it a couple of times. I wanted to revive it when I started playing with Jack Herrick and Bob Vasile a few years ago, but it's tricky because the verses are very short and dense and it was hard to figure out how to space them out for some breathing room. The tune I finally settled on is a version of the English Country Dance "Mary and Dorothy." Bob sang and played bouzouki and I tracked the rest of it. 

I made this video when I was visiting my daughter and had no access to art supplies, so it was all done on computer. I just got a drawing tablet and am struggling to make it work. My granddaughter and I really laughed over the last image (they were mostly generated by Bing Image Search) because the woman so clearly is not buying what her sailor is trying to sell her.

Animated music video: Take a Bumper and Try (from the woman's point of view)

In the 1980s I sang this song with Bob Vasile to great audience approbation. Middle aged ladies would come up to me and say "That's the story of my life." Beth Holmgren and I recorded it on our cd "Courting Disaster" way back when... A couple years ago I recorded it again with Bob and Jack Herrick, and Jack mixed it in his studio, and this video is the result.

The song was originally from a man's point of view, and of course outrageously sexist. It was popular in Colonial America, and can be found in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time; A Collection of Ancient Songs, Ballads and Dance Tunes.. with... Notices... from Writers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries published in 1859. Some enjoyable (if you like this sort of thing) verses we didn't sing include:

They tell me, my love would in time have been cloy'd;
And that beauty's insipid when once 'ts enjoy'd;
But in wine I both time and enjoyment defy;
For the longer I drink the more thirsty I am.

Perhaps, like her sex, ever false to their word,
She had left me, to get an estate or a lord;
But my bumper (regarding nor title or pelf)
Will stand by me when I can't stand by myself.

Pelf, by the way, is a wonderful word used in other Colonial American songs. It means "money, especially when gained in a dishonest or dishonorable way."

Although audiences laugh at this song, I find it deeply melancholy as I had an alcoholic mother who drank alone. That's why I decided to start this video with bright colors and finish it in somber hues.