Music
Celtic Maritime Connections is supporting Music in Pembrokeshire and County Wexford and these pages will hopefully refer to some of the events and artists, performing around our coasts.
As usual please get in touch with Celtic Maritime Connections if you would like your details mentioned here.
Tenby Blues Festival
This year is the first ever Tenby Blues Festival, it will occur from the
10th to the 12th November
This is a very exciting venture and hopefully the start of an annual event to match the Brecon Jazz event of the summer, it is an opportunity to lighten up the winter with a weekend of music and entertainment
for more details on the Tenby Blues Festival follow the link
Pembrokeshire Folk and Traditional Singing
Pembrokeshire is alive with Folk Music and traditional singing, there are wonderful opportunities to join in or to just watch and listen
For more information on local singing and music see
www.pembrokeshire-folk-music.co.uk
Shanty singing at the SeaFair Haven event in the summer
In Milford this week singers from the local folk music club had a rare opportunity to try out old sea shanties on the magnificent square-rig ships assembled for the Seafairhaven festival. It is probably more than two generations since this was a common feature of sailing ships here in west Wales and the shanty singing on board the “Earl of Pembroke” and the “Kaskelot” was therefore a very rare event. A crowd of crew and sightseers assembled on the quayside to hear the singing and see the line pulling.
Now, there are shanties and there are sea songs. Every shanty is a sea song in a way, but every sea song is not a shanty. Songs were sung on sailing ships, some for pleasure and some for business. The shanty is really for business. Anchors had to be weighed, yards sent up, sails furled and in the days before power winches all this was done by hand, by manpower. The shanty is a song to keep time in tramping round a capstan or hauling in a rope. Keeping time made the job easier. There are different types of shanty for different kinds of jobs, hand-over-hand hauling, short hard pulls, pumping, etc.
“Kaskelot” had set up a running line to the masthead, which gave the singing group a realistic pull on the rope without any danger to the crew or upsetting the rig. A five man team was assembled, with one man as “shanty-man”, to sing the leading line solo, the men singing the refrain in chorus, heaving away at the first and last beat in the line and getting a fresh grip for the next pull while the shanty-man sings his next line and so on. Sounds complicated? It was! However, after an initial trial the system worked and the result was delightful. There was a resounding cheer when the line came in and crew finished the heave. Other shanties were tried, long haul, short haul and the music went on nearly all day. Few who were there will forget the sight, which was once part of everyday Milford life, now gone. The songs still remain part of our heritage, though it may be a while before we see a shanty line haul on a square-rigger again!
