Contents

Menhaden Chanteys

To Hear a Menhaden Chantey

To Learn More About Menhaden Chanteys

Catching Menhaden with a Purse Seine

A History of Menhaden Fishing

Maryland Students Receive Knauss Fellowships

On the Northern Neck region of Virginia, a peninsula lying between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers, a group of men in their 70s and 80s have been keeping alive an uncommon legacy of African American worksongs sung on the water. As young men, they worked aboard fishing boats where they pulled up by hand nets teeming with menhaden from the waters of the Chesapeake and Atlantic. From long rowboats, as many as 40 men hauled in a "purse seine," a net filled with thousands of pounds of fish. To accomplish this back-breaking feat, they sang what were called "chanteys" to coordinate their movements. These fishermen's worksongs could have been heard on boats out of Virginia and North Carolina wherever they pursued the great migrating schools of menhaden along the Atlantic coast, from New Jersey to the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1991, William Hudnall organized the Northern Neck Chantey Singers at the request of the Greater Reedville Association and the Association's Museum Committee - there were two groups of menhaden chantey singers performing in North Carolina and the Association hoped to find some singers in Virginia for a special July 4th program. Interest in the group has been so great that they've been performing ever since. The singers are retired African American watermen from Northumberland County who worked in the menhaden fishery over a 50-year period beginning in the 1930s, for the oldest of them, and into the 1980s for some of the younger men. All of them worked on the water during the time when chanteys were sung.

Chanteys, and worksongs in general, occupy a special place in African American culture – they are songs that have a function: to make work go better. In the case of the menhaden fishermen, the songs rhythmically coordinated the efforts of hauling in the nets to bring fish to the surface where they could then be transferred to the holds of the "mother" ship. But this simple explanation doesn't account for the almost inexplicable quality that the men attribute to the chantey's effect on their ability to raise an otherwise intractable load.

"The harmony brings everybody together on the same chord at the same time, and that's what made the work easier," says Hudnall. On the group's audiotape, "See You When the Sun Goes Down," Hudnall describes the effect of the chanteys: "You'd be pulling as hard as you possibly could pull. And I mean you'd be straining. And you couldn't get them [fish] to come up at all. Somebody hit that chantey, and started to get into it. And after awhile you see, here it starts coming up. Inch by inch. Inch by inch. After awhile they'd start showing. That's where you'd see all this foam start dripping. You hadn't killed them and they hadn't killed you. But it was fifty-fifty – you were nearly dead and so were they." Hauling up a light set might not require a chantey, but hauling up a heavy one could take as much as an hour or two of concerted pulling, and success depended on the rhythms of the music.

The Northern Neck Chantey Singers harmonize in William Hudnall's backyard. From left to right are William Hudnall, Edward Taylor, Lloyd Warner, E.B. Chewning, James Carter, Selby Basker, Ellsworth Landon and Calvin Hill. Members of the group not pictured are James Cain, William Carter, Eddie Clark, Josh Curry, Richard Tarleton and Captain Charles Winstead.

In a chantey, says Hudnall, "the person calling comes a little before the others. They are following the leader. They reach when he reaches – they all reach together, some ahead, some behind. But they all pull together." He likens the call to telling a horse "git up." When someone says "hey," he knows he's got to pull. In the late 1950s, the introduction of the hydraulic power block for hoisting menhaden nets made the work easier, but signaled the demise of the tradition of chantey singing. The songs were ignored for thirty years until interest by folklorists led to their rediscovery as a valuable part of maritime and musical history.

The Northern Neck has always been somewhat isolated – separated by water and with no access by railroad, it was traditionally served by boats and, in modern times, by trucks. The economy in the area developed around the fishing industry – crabs, oysters and especially the menhaden fishery. The small town of Reedville, located on the Great Wicomico River at the top of the Northern Neck near the Bay, was once known as the menhaden capital of the world. At the turn of the century the town's populace had the highest per capita wealth in the United States. Between 1873 and 1877 fishermen in the U.S. harvested 1.7 billion pounds of menhaden. While the catch has declined, the fishery remains significant. According to the National Fisheries Institute, approximately 40% of annual U.S. Atlantic coast commercial landings by weight are Atlantic menhaden. Landings for bait by other fisheries (pound net and purse seine) account for about 5% of total Atlantic catch. In 1997, 657 million pounds of Atlantic menhaden were caught at a value of $40.1 million. Reedville remains home to Omega Protein, the last remaining menhaden processing plant between North Carolina and Maine, and is still the major port for landings on the Atlantic.

Origins of the Chanteys

The chantey has roots in some of the earliest African customs brought and nurtured by slave populations in the United States and the Americas. In Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands Lydia Parrish writes of worksongs called "shanties or chanteys" sung by African Americans working on plantations near a navigable river, and also reports of these being heard in Georgia as early as the 1880s. Parrish notes that the chanteys tended to die out as the work that demanded them dwindled. Exactly when chanteys were first used for helping men lift nets in the menhaden fishery is unknown, though it is likely that the practice began when purse seine technology, developed in the northern states, came to be used in the southern states of Virginia and North and South Carolina, where African American crews and labor were common at the end of the 19th century.

The liner notes of the audiotape of Northern Neck Chantey Singers, produced by the Virginia Folklife Program, provides an excellent history of chantey singing by black menhaden fishermen. They tell of a tradition that was little known, probably because chanteys were sung only at sea by men working in a specialized fishing industry with only two centers of production: Reedville, Virginia and Beaufort, North Carolina. Such chanteys were uncommon in American commercial fisheries, and menhaden chanteys are for the most part unrelated to traditional, and better known, "sea chanteys" that flourished among the crews of 19th century American and British transatlantic sailing ships.

Chantey singing among menhaden fishermen, which became widespread around 1920, represents an adaptation of worksongs by African Americans in various mainland occupations during the late 19th century – lumbering and mining and building roads, railroads, levees and sailboats. Says William Hudnall, "Years ago they used to work on sailboats and [they would sing as they] caulked. They had a story about a big sail-boat where they had men lined up, singing and hammering away. The [big boss] went up and complained to the foreman about the men down there singing, and [the foreman] said 'do you want me to make them stop?' He said 'yeah' and then they didn't know how to work! They sang chanteys and that's what made the work go!"

African American worksongs go back to a West African tradition that combines the call and response form, the improvisatory nature of the words, and the functional relation of the songs to the lives of the singers. By bringing together the combined efforts of men laboring at a common task, the worksong actually improved the workers' efficiency and made it possible for them to do things they could not do with uncoordinated individual effort. The fact that laborers accomplished more work if they were allowed to sing has been documented since the time of slavery so overseers not only encouraged slaves to sing, but often tolerated critical or satirical lyrics. As Frederick Douglass wrote, "A silent slave is not liked by the masters." Worksongs allowed black workers to gain a measure of control over the work – to turn it into a form of expression and to control the pace of the work itself.

The Chanteymen

African American watermen, like their white counterparts throughout the Chesapeake region, have always been self-reliant and independent. Making their livelihoods on the bounty of the Bay was one of the most profitable occupations for those on the Northern Neck in the first half of the century, particularly for young men. The work was mostly seasonal – the menhaden season usually ran from May until October, occasionally in a warm year stretching until Thanksgiving, or even later as the larger boats ranged farther down the coast hunting enormous schools of fish. When nets were hauled by hand, the crews were primarily African American, while the captain and the mates were mostly white. Crew work on a menhaden boat during those times was grueling. "The work required brawn," says Hudnall, "you had to pull that net." Those who did it were mostly young men in their teens and twenties.

"The menhaden industry was not the only one that sang chanteys," says William Hudnall, manager of the Northern Neck Chantey singers. "They [sang working on] railroads and chain gangs."

Early on the crews had to shovel up to a ton of coal onto steam-driven vessels at quayside before heading out to sea to row purse boats and haul heavy nets. The vessels lacked the most rudimentary amenities, like toilets or water for washing or refrigerated holds, and the men were sometimes at sea for days and weeks. The smell of menhaden, soaked in ammonia as a preservative, along with the latrines on board, were hard to take. Now, in contrast to the early days of menhaden fishing, Hudnall says, "Everything is nice, just like a floating hotel. You may get a little smell from the fish sometimes, but they freeze them right on the boat."

The crew had to deal with a system that was sometimes abusive. Captains would at times hold back some of each man's pay – in the early days when the pay was $25 a month, they might hold back $5 a month to be paid at the end of the fishing season to ensure that the crew would stay for the duration. Says Hudnall, "We used to have a problem sometime with some of the captains – when it got close to the end of the season, they got hard to get along with because they wanted you to quit and they could put that $5 [a month] in their pocket!" Though there were no labor unions to improve conditions, one rule was sacrosanct: the captain would never fire a crew member at sea and the crew would never quit. "You'd never quit at sea, because on the water you depended on each other. You'd never jeopardize [each other's] safety – that was a code we wouldn't violate. Soon as you got on the dock you might take a brick and hit him in the head," he jokes, "but you wouldn't do it on the water."

Work on the menhaden boats afforded financial independence to young black men. At the same time, they suffered from harsh and sometimes abusive working conditions and from separation from loved ones. In keeping with the tradition of field hollers, worksongs and the blues, chanteys gave the crew freedom of expression – the songs expressed all manner of thoughts and ideas from loss to lust to criticism of captains. In general they depicted the circumstances and concerns of the singers. The lyrics of various songs formed a vocabulary – lyrics and verses from different songs, including blues and even gospel at times, were interchangeable and formed a pool for improvisation of new songs that enabled the singers to express their day-to-day thoughts and concerns.

Crews sang of work and homesickness, relationships and the women left behind. They repeated the lyrics from familiar blues songs and, just as in blues, no subject was out of bounds. Beyond earshot of anything but fish and birds, the young men sang songs of whatever came to mind without regard for any sense of what might be fitting or seemly on land. "They were just as wild and rough as anything you've seen in your life," says Hudnall. "That was the first problem we had when we formed the group – we cleaned [the songs up] cause all this language is different. What was said wasn't even fit to say out there on the water."

Sometimes when they perform, says Hudnall, people familiar with the old ways ask to hear "Abilena,"' a song about a woman of ill repute – "She was a lady of the night, and the attributes that she had, when you talk about that on the water, that wasn't even fit for the birds to hear!" Still, some of the bawdier songs were very effective when it came to hauling nets, according to Hudnall: "They always say you'd raise more fish with 'Abilena' than any other chantey."

Rediscovering a Legacy

When Hudnall was approached in 1991 about getting together some men to sing chanteys for a special program, he thought it had been too long to locate any but decided to give it a try anyway. To his surprise he found thirteen former fishermen willing to participate. The men in the group, all deacons in their churches, were reluctant at first to sing chanteys at all. They finally decided they could do it if they cleaned up the lyrics. As the last of a group of fishermen who participated in chantey singing, they feel it is important to document and preserve this integral part of African American maritime history. Hudnall says they don't know how long they'll be able to continue, but they'll do it as long as they can. They've performed throughout Virginia, in Maryland, and they've had requests to sing all over the country.

"These songs represent a very unusual if not unique example of worksongs that developed in the 20th century and evolved out of the classic worksong tradition," says ethnomusicologist Luvenia A. George, Program Coordinator for the Smithsonian Division of Cultural History. "Wherever black people worked there was music and these chanteys represent the men who worked on the seas. The original sources of these songs are dying out so it is more important than ever to preserve them." Hudnall and the singers will perform in early May at the "Blessing of the Fleet," in Reedville and in July at the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, Virginia, continuing to keep alive that legacy.

For More Information

Virginia Marine Resources Bulletin, Spring 1994, Volume 26, Number 1. A concise overview of menhaden, including life history, catching and processing fish and chantey singing. Available from the Virginia Sea Grant Program, Sea Grant Communications, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point, Virginia 23062, phone (804) 684-7164. You may also download a pdf copy (requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader).

The Men All Singing: The Story of Menhaden Fishing by John Frye, 242 pp., provides a thorough look at menhaden - from the species itself to the history of the fishing and processing industries and the tradition of chantey singing. Reprinted in 1999 by the the Reedville Fishermen's Museum, which sells copies for $19.95. Order by phone, (804) 453-6529, web, http://www.rfmuseum.org/, or e-mail, bunker@crosslink.net.

Chantey Singers

• More about the Northern Neck Chantey Singers and the project that supported the production of their audiotape is on the web at minerva.acc.virginia.edu/~foundhum/vfp/chanteys.html.
  
  
• To see a video of the chantey singers performing, visit YouTube http://youtu.be/aYG0qlP3-e4.
  
  
• Information about the chantey singers in Beaufort, North Carolina, is on the web at www.ncarts.org/ncfha/menha_fa.html.
  
  
• To find out about booking a performance by the Northern Neck Chantey Singers, contact William Hudnall, Rt. 3, Box 225, Heathsville, Virginia 22473.

Harold Anderson is a freelance researcher, writer, lecturer and musician who specializes in African American social history and arts.

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