'Da Merry Boys O Greenland': Explorations into the Musical Dialogue of Shetland's Nautical Past

Abstract

Abstract Many of the songs and tunes in Shetland's musical repertoire have been inspired by the islanders' long associations with the sea and seafaring. A number of these were transported back across the Atlantic from whaling and fur-trading expeditions to the Arctic fringes and carry tales related to Shetland's rich maritime past. During the time of the Greenland fishery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most ships included a member of the crew able to play the fiddle and keep up the crew's spirits. In this article, my main aim is to explore the concept of musical migration, particularly in terms of transatlantic musical flow, as an important aspect of both the Shetland musical tradition and the musical traditions of indigenous populations outside Shetland that have been influenced by the transatlantic nature of the music. In doing this, I will attempt to start drawing together two separate music histories, that of the Inuit musicians and dances influenced by European whalers and fur traders across the Arctic, and that of the Shetlanders who sailed to the regions and, for many years, shared a performance milieu with the indigenous groups that lived there. ********** Much of the instrumental and vocal repertoire of the Shetland Islands has been subsumed into the tradition as a result of the islanders' long associations with the sea, seafarers, and seafaring. Indeed, as a predominantly oral tradition, most of the song and tune material learned and performed by Shetlanders prior to the twentieth century (and the introduction of the phonograph in 1910) was done so through person-to-person contact and, as I will demonstrate in this article, the occupational world of Shetland sailors was particularly conducive to musical exchanges. Musicians, and in particular fiddlers, were often sought after as employees in the fishing and whaling industries, and it was these men who returned with a wealth of new musical material that was learned and composed during their travels. In addition to this, Shetlanders contributed to the profound impact of European influence on indigenous populations across the Arctic during the times of the whaling industry and the fur trade. This was particularly manifested in the adoption and indigenization of instrumental music and dance traditions by Inuit and other aboriginal groups. In this article, my main aim is to explore the concept of musical migration, particularly in terms of transatlantic musical flow, as an important aspect of both the Shetland musical tradition and the musical traditions of indigenous populations outside Shetland that have been influenced by the transatlantic nature of the music. In doing so, I will attempt to start drawing together two separate music histories, that of the Inuit musicians and dancers influenced by European whalers and fur traders across the Arctic, and that of the Shetlanders who sailed to the regions and for many years shared a performance milieu with the indigenous groups who lived there. While there has been separate (albeit limited) research conducted into both the music of whalers and fur traders in the Arctic, and the performance traditions that grew up among indigenous groups as a result of those social interactions, there has been little attempt to draw together these two parallel music histories. In this article, I will be interrogating the role of music as a historical resource from which we can learn much about the cultural history not only of Shetland but of the places to which Shetlanders have been linked through seafaring. In so doing, I would like to demonstrate how the Shetland performance tradition resonates with historian Graeme Milne's observations on British shanty singing: that while the repertoire is symbolic of a particular monocultural identity, the music is in fact surprisingly cosmopolitan in its origins. (1) The sea is not a boundary but a highway, and in this context a musical highway, with the music playing a role in reflecting and reinforcing the identity, concerns, and observations of Shetlanders in terms of their nautical world view. …

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