Seafaring

The MiL has this habit of cruising Amazon and buying completely random CDs for Cubby. This is how we ended up with a CD of traditional children's songs sung by Metropolitan Opera stars (Cubby is not such a fan); the longest damned children's CD in the world with 40 annoying songs such as a hip-hop version of "Pop Goes the Weasel" (Cubby IS a fan--especially of the toot toots in "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad"); a CD of really terrible Scottish songs sung by a man in the manner of a very dramatic Broadway musical; and no less than THREE CDs of sea shanties.

Let us talk about that last one.

Do you even know what sea shanties are? I didn't either. But thanks to the information included on our copy of Blow the Man Down, I now know that they were songs pretty much used to help men work harder on ships. When they were rowing or doing something similarly rhythmic, they would all bellow songs to the beat of their drudgery. How fun.

It should surprise no one that these songs all sound as if they're being performed by a bunch of drunken men waving beer steins at a pub and swaying to the stirring sounds of "Tom's Gone to Hilo."

Hilo is a port in Peru. I know these things now.

ANYWAY.

Many of the songs are about women. Big surprise, right? And of course, we all know the sorts of women sailors sing about. They are, apparently, referred to generically as "Spanish ladies." Which seems somewhat unfair to the real ladies of Spain, but whatever. There are even a group of songs devoted to the sorts of, ahem, clinical ailments a sailor may experience after a little dalliance with one of these Spanish ladies. On the Blow the Man Down CD, the song devoted to this subject is called "The Fireship," and is a masterpiece of salty euphemisms in which the unlucky sailor enters pretty Sally's lowered gangway and then has trouble with his main mast.

I am so not kidding about this.

I'm not sure how much Cubby is getting out of these sea shanties, but there is no doubt that they have provided significant amusement for me.