A popular “old time” tune to this day, “Sail Away Ladies” displays its uniqueness in deriving its roots from traditional sea shanty format while maintaining a fiddle tune pulse. The song’s “Floater lyrics” allow the singer to belt out any phrase that strikes them, while the chorus of “Don’t you (she) rock ‘em, Daddy-O” returns time and again. Ethnomusicologist Craig Edwards of Mystic, Connecticut, suggests that the chorus may have originated from Black steamboat workers singing this song to keep themselves in step while loading cargo across a dangerous plank. “Don’t rock ‘em,” indeed. If the board was rocked, the workers would fall off into the cold waters below.
The tune would first be recorded by “Uncle” Bunt Stevens. In 1926, he beat 1,876 other fiddlers and became “World Champion Fiddler,” playing the same version of the song recorded here. The traditional lyrics to the tune were recorded later by “Uncle” Dave Macon and are thought to originate from Kentucky. Harry Smith, editor of the Smithsonian Folkways “Anthology of American Folk Music,” which became “one of the most influential releases in the history of recorded sound,” credits Bunt Stephen’s performance of “Sail Away Ladies” as “probably similar to much American dance music in the period between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.”
In the Nutmeggers’ recordings featured on “In High Water: Songs of the Civil War,” we hope to do justice to those musicians who came before us, and especially those who gave their all, that we might see “a new birth of freedom.” We seek to honor the spirit and humanity of those brave souls who fought so that this nation might live. This is their music, and these are their stories.
Sources
Anthology of American Folk Music. Folkways Records, 1952. Smithsonian Folkways, folkways.si.edu/anthology-of-american-folk-music/african-american-music-blues-old-time/music/album/smithsonian.
Brody, David. Fiddler's Fakebook. 1983, p. 241.
Ford, Thomas. Traditional Music in America. 1940, p. 35.
Phillips, Stacy. Traditional American Fiddle Tunes, vol. 1. 1994.
"Annotation:Sail away Ladies (1)." Traditional Tune Archive, tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Sail_away_Ladies_(1).
Edwards, Craig. Personal Interview. Mystic Connecticut.
