NEW ZEALAND
FAKE *SONG 		Blood Red Roses
  John Leebrick   1957

In 1957, Colquhoun asked the Schillinger Institute in New York if any American composers knew of songs which nineteenth century American whalemen had sung while hunting in New Zealand waters. Several months later he received a letter containing six such songs from John Leebrick, an elderly composer in the United States.

In 1968, Bailey & Roth very pointedly omitted Leebrick's Blood Red Roses from their collection of traditional NZ folk songs 'Shanties By The Way:' it had obviously been concocted from recent songs, one of them composed only a few months earlier.

This web document summarizes a 2001-11 thread in Mudcat.org

Leebrick's 1957 version.

Come all you sealers and listen to me
A lovely song I'll sing to thee.
It was in eighteen hundred and three,
Come down you blood red roses, come down,
That we set sail for the southern sea,
Oh, you pinks and posies,
Come down you blood red roses, come down.

Our captain he has set us down
And he has sailed for Sydney town,
And he has left us with some grub,
Come down you blood red roses, come down,
Just one split pea in a ten pound tub,
Oh you pinks and posies,
Come down you blood red roses, come down.

A bull seal he is bigger than a mouse
But a sealer's lot is lower than a louse,
And now we're all covered over with fur,
Come down you blood red roses, come down,
We've grown us tails like Lucifer,
Oh you pinks and posies,
Come down you blood red roses, come down.
 
And when our captain returns to hell,
Come don you blood red roses, come down,
Why we will treat him here for a spell.
Oh you pinks and posies,
Come down you blood red roses, come down.

Colquhoun described this as a halyard shanty1 to be sung very fast. But this is not in the halyard shanty format, and hauling a ship's heavy yard up the mainmast is slow work, and needs a slow, strong beat and simple rhyme. This fast story-telling is a fo'castle entertainment song.


Let's see how Leebrick's version evolved.

Come Down You Bunch o' Roses

Azizi Powell in her study of customs of  Africans in the Americas, explains that the Caribbean children's singing game, "Coming Down With A Bunch Of Roses" referred to girls carrying a bunch of roses while walking down the row between parallel lines. A pretty female, or a sweetheart, was referred to as a "bunch of roses."
Lomax recorded this in Trinidad in 1997.


Annie, Annie, coming down
with a bunch of roses, coming down

You walk in style coming down
With a bunch of roses, coming down

You show me your dress,
You show me your hat,
You show me your shoes,
You dance the rumba
You dance the limbo

This was danced as a version of our Virginia Reel, and probably still is.

The children were imitating the courtship dance of young adults, like this one observed in Tobago in 1928

1. Lift up you' clotheses, comin' dung;
Right up to you' noses, comin' dung.

Comin' dung with you' bunch o'roses,
Comin' dung; x2
2. Gal show me you' motion, x2
3. Bring in you' lover, x2      See more here

In England, a pretty girl was called an 'English rose.' So a group of English girls, or one especially pretty girl, may have been called a bunch of roses. No roses grew in the tropical Caribbean climate, but African slaves probably learnt the game/dance from English sugarcane growers, added their faster, stronger, African rhythms to it, and their children copied them. 

The nineteenth century resurgence of work songs at sea began with the recruitment of black seamen who had grown up singing work songs on land.  In the Caribean, as in Africa, song and music intertwined with every phase and pattern of human life, including the world of work. Mustrad

Captain R.C. Adams, in his chronicle of life On Board the Rocket (1879), on page 65, told of this being sung by the negro crew of an American ship when they were mastheading the maintopsail.


In Chapter XII of his book Adams describes other sailors' songs he heard.

A. sentimental forecastle songs
Dibden's early 1800s songs giving way to melodies of Africans from the Americas and popular shore songs of the day:

B. work songs
1st, for a few strong pulls, eg Haul The Bowline,
2nd, for a long hoists, eg Reuben Ranzo,
3rd, for continuous effort, with a strong Irish influence,
       eg Paddy on the Railway.

Gordon Grant gives a similar Roses version in Windjammer Sketches Alow and Aloft, (1930). He sailed aboard the 'Balclutha' in 1925 and describes this song being used for swaying off:

"They have set the main topgallant staysail. In order to stretch it taut along the stay one man takes a turn under the belaying pin; the other two stand on the fife rail, grasp the halliards, and "sway off," putting all the weight into it. As they bend their knees, the slack is taken up on the pin and the process repeated."

Ho, Molly come down,
Come down with your pretty posey,
Come down with your cheeks so rosy,
Ho, Molly, come down
He O! He O!

So here's a more authentic historical version.

        
Oh, yes, my lads, we’ll roll alee,
   COME down, you bunch of ro ses, COME down,
We’ll soon be far away from sea,
  COME down, you bunch of ro ses, COME down,

   Oh, you pinks an’ poses,
   COME down, you bunch of ro ses, COME down,
   Oh, you pinks an’ poses,
  COME down, you bunch of ro ses, COME down,

Oh, what do yer s’pose we had for supper?
Black-eyed beans and bread and butter.

Oh, Poll’s in the garden picking peas,
She’s got fine hair way down to her knees.

I went downstairs and peeked through a crack,
And saw her stealing a kiss from Jack.

I grabbed right hold of a piece of plank,
And ran out quick and gave her a spank.


Come Down, You Red Red Roses

Burl Ives had found this version in 1955. He released a recording of it on the 1st of January 1956.
Come sailors listen unto me:
Come down you bunch of roses, come down
A lovely song I'll sing to thee
Oh, you pinks and posies
Come down, you red, red roses, come down

A whale is bigger than a mouse
A sailor's lower than a louse

The cook he rolled out all the grub:
One split pea in a ten-pound tub

In eighteen hundred and fifty-three
Oh, you pinks and posies

In eighteen hundred and fifty-five
I was breathing but not alive

In eighteen hundred and fifty-seven
We sailed up to the gates of Heaven

Saint Peter would not let us in
He sent us back to earth again

All this is true that I do tell
The ship we're on's a livin' Hell

The captain's covered o'er with fur
Has grown a tail like Lucifer

Go Down You Blood Red Roses

This phrase only goes back as far as 1954 when A.L. Lloyd invented it to help build up the atmosphere of grim foreboding as the peg-legged Captain Ahab left port in the otherwise very authentically filmed Hollywood movie, Moby Dick, released in 1956.

      
Yes, our boots and clothes is all in pawn
    Go down, you blood red roses, go down!
And its flamin’ drafty ’round Cape Horn,

    Go down, you blood red roses, go down!
    Oh, you pinks and posies,
    Go down, you blood red roses, go down!

It’s ’round that cape we all must go
Around all stiff through the frost and snow.

Oh my old mother, she wrote to me,
My dearest son, come home from sea.

It’s growl you may, but go you must,
If you growl too hard your head they’ll bust.

Just one more pull and that will do
For we’re the boys to kick her through.

So when John Leebrick received a request for South Pacific whaling songs, just after hearing Burl Ives and watching Moby Dick, and already having collected a forecastle song about marooned sealers in Fiordland, he must have decided to create another forecastle song about a gang of stranded sealers.2

1. Halyard Shanty 

a halyard or halliard is a line (rope) used to hoist a sail, flag or yard. The term comes from the Middle English halier = "a rope to haul with."

A 'yard' was the nautical term for a horizontal spar used on square-rigged sailing ships. Because they were very heavy, some yards were lowered in stormy weather to give the ship more stability. After the storm, seamen had the task of hauling the 2-ton yard back up again.

On warships there were plenty of men to do this work, but on commercial sailing ships in the 1700s and 1800s, crew numbers were kept small to make more profit. So hauling the yard up with only a few men had to be done in short bursts, with the shortened line fastened after each pull, so a slow but steady shanty gave the timing, and kept the men's spirits up during this backbreaking task.

Notice that there was NOT a set number of verses in a true work shanty; the shantyman kept going until the hauling job was finished, either repeating verses, borrowing them from other songs, or ad-libbing.

Maori/Polynesian sailors' hauling shanties.

These were used to haul a waka ashore for storage, or to haul a river waka of visitors up into shallow waters and onto dry land.
 Toia mai, TE WAKA
 Ki te urunga, TE WAKA
etc.

I have been "hauled up" onto a Waikato marae with
        Tenei te TANGATA
        PuhuruHURU
        nana i TIKI MAI
        whakawhiti te RA!
        a huPANE,
        a kauPANE!
        whiti te RA!
This chant was also used to haul the 'Tainui' waka ashore after its colonizing voyage from Tahiti, 500 years before Te Rauparaha "composed' it.

Here is a longer portaging "hauling shanty"
Te tangi te kiwi, KIWI!


A newly-hewed waka being portaged down Hawkestone St, Wgtn, in 1845

2. Stranded Sealers
Davy Lowston's Jackson Bay gang was not the only abandoned group: most sealing gangs who worked the southern bays and islands suffered from lack of food and exposure to wind and cold, or were completely forgotten.

In 1813 a ship took five men off the Solanders in Foveaux Strait - two had been there since 1808. They had made their own clothing and shelters out of sealskin, and had eaten nothing but seal meat. The Yankee whaler Enterprise rescued three men from the Snares in 1817 who had been set down in 1810 with just an iron pot.

Clubbing Seals today

This photo was taken in Canada in the 1980s, but about 25-30,000 baby seals are still clubbed to death there every year. Baby seals were also killed in Siberia until the practice was banned in 2009.  click

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