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John Kanaka

from Shower Chanteys by Chris Maden

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about

“John Kanaka” is a halyard chantey with an interesting debate; as I wrote to my backers after recording this:

The chantey “John Kanaka” is an interesting point of chantey nerdery. Many folk music fans, and many recording artists, sing the chorus as “John Kanaka-naka, too-rye-ay.” The “too-rye-ay” sounds like a good ol’ Irish folk song bit o’ nonsense.

However, Stan Hugill was notorious for interrupting performances to lecture the audience that “there’s no R in the Samoan language; it’s ‘too-LIE-ay!’” In Shanties from the Seven Seas, the Bible of sea chanteys, he writes, “The chorus is of Polynesian origin and I should say the words ‘tulai ē’ were Samoan.” Now, Stan was a polymath and polyglot, and definitely knew quite a bit about Polynesian languages (not to mention chanteys). That said, he was not a formal, rigorous scholar, and he provides no evidence nor citation for his assertion about the chorus here. He has proven to be wrong about a few other speculations, so everything in his book (which is, to be clear, invaluable) should be taken with a grain of salt.

… for more notes, see music.maden.org/index.php?title=John_Kanaka

credits

from Shower Chanteys, released October 1, 2018

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Chris Maden Raymond, New Hampshire

Singer of traditional songs and other stuff.

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