A new project that I have been working on has led to me looking at the history of some lesser known songs. While many of these appeared on undated broadsides, I was struck by how often the Traditional Ballad Index directed me to the journals of the old whalers for the earliest confirmed date of a song. It was Gale Huntington who first recognised that some of the men who undertook the long voyages on the whalers wrote songs they had heard in their personal journals. His book, Songs the Whalermen Sang (1964, 1970) is a mine of information and a delight to read. Huntington died in 1993, but his second book, The Gam, More Songs the Whalermen Sang, which is equally valuable, was published in (2014). If, when you have read these, (or even before you read them) you want to know more, have a look at the Kendall Whaling Museum Monographs, which include a fascinating article about the ‘Songs of the Polly, 1795’ by Stuart Frank, as well as some other interesting monographs by him.
