The John B Sails

J & I recorded tonight. The last one we put down, a College St. version of a traditional Cajun two-step sounds great - J added some synthesized tuba during the week and now it just needs to be mixed down.

I sat down and played a version of the Sloop John B. for J, and we decided to record it, with a slow hymn-like intro, and new instruments added each verse. Everyone knows this melody and I think most people would say it is a Beach Boys tune, because they had a pop hit with it. Here's a description of the origin of the song, from the Old Town School of Music in Chicago:
Around 1926, John T. McCutcheon and his wife learned to sing this song while spending time in the West Indies. McCutcheon was a world traveller, philosopher and the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune. He said of “The John B. Sails” that, “Time and usage have given the song almost the dignity of a national anthem around Nassau.”
A sloop is a kind of sailing vessel which commonly has only one mast and perhaps a bowsprit - a single spar extending forward from the front end of the boat. The kind of sloops that sailed around Nassau, and the kind referenced in “The John B. Sails,” were smallish, perhaps 16-footers. They functioned much like country wagons in pioneer America. With a crew of 4 or 5 sailors, a crowded little sloop may have brought livestock, produce, passengers and other goods for trade from an island two or three hundred miles away. Sea-scarred and ragged, its deck only a few inches above the waves, a sloop carried no charts, no compasses and no auxiliary engine. The only navigational tools were the instincts and experience of a Bahamian pilot who was at home on the reef-filled azure sea.
In the mid-1950s, singer and actor Harry Belafonte added many of the popular folk songs from his Caribbean heritage - including “The John B. Sails” - to his performances and recordings, effectively igniting the Calypso movement in American popular song.
Around that same time, the Old Town School of Folk Music was founded in Chicago. There's a story that says “The John B. Sails” was the first song sung by Frank Hamilton, Win Stracke and a host of other musicians and prospective students as part of the opening ceremonies at the Old Town School.

We are recording the tune as an instrumental, but many of you will remember these lyrics:

THE JOHN B's SAILS

[D] We come on the sloop John B,
my Grandfather and me.
Around Nassau town we did [A7] roam.
Drinkin' all [D] night.
Got into a [G] - [Em] fight.
Well, I [D] feel so break up, [A7] I want to go [D] home.

Chorus:
Hoist up the John B's sails.
See how the main sails set.
Call for the captain ashore, let me go home.
Let me go home.
I want to go home.
Well, I feel so break up, I want to go home.

First mate, he got drunk.
Broke up the people's trunk.
Constable had to come and take him away.
Sheriff John Stone,
why don't you leave me alone?
Well, I feel so break up, I want to go home.

Chorus

Well, the poor cook he caught the fits.
Throw away all of my grits.
Then he took and he ate up all of my corn.
Let me go home.
I want to go home.
This is the worst trip since I've been born.

Chorus

Here is Roger McGuinn singing The John B Sails.
And here is the Beach Boys with their take on the song:


...but how about Johnny Cash and Eddy Albert (???) singing it? Har!