Recently I heard a professor of literature who had met a worksong in some book he had read, and fallen in love, and turned all rhapsodic about worksongs.
He just didn't get it. Work songs aren't literature; they're just work songs. It's like this current push to call the Bible "literature." Sure, some of it is literary -- the Song of Deborah is a beautiful (if gory) piece of poetry, and the way the Gospel of John uses very simple words to convey big ideas is astonishing. But the first chapter of Ephesians is little more than the world's longest run-on sentence, and the Greek of the Gospel of Mark is so bad that some of it can only be understood by pretending it's Aramaic, and parts of Daniel are in Hebrew that at least one commentator called "abominable." You didn't have to be a great writer to get into the Bible; that's not what it's for.
Similarly, a song doesn't have to be great to make a good worksong. A short- haul shanty doesn't need clever words; it just needs to be easy to remember and sing at the right speed to help the sailors heave. A hammer song is also concerned with timing. If the words start to get fancy, the singer might start worrying about them too much and get out of time.
But no matter what the genre, it contains the occasional gem that transcends the form. An example of this is street cries--a few centuries ago, poor people walked the streets of London selling matches, or flowers, or milk, and they all had a song of sorts. Most of these are long forgotten--but one, Sweet Blooming Lavender, was good enough that it survived and has been collected several times from people who never sold lavender in their lives.
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore is a worksong example of that. It probably began life as a rowing song; the two earliest versions, from Allan, Ware, and Garrison's 1867 book Slave Songs of the United States, are both from the East Coast barrier islands--one from the Port Royal Islands and one from Hilton Head.
Their primary version (from the Port Royal Islands, transcribed by Charles Pickard Ware) isn't quite like the versions we all got sick of in camp. It doesn't repeat the first line of the verse; rather, each repeat of the melody has two separate lines plus the chorus of "hallelujah." The melody is also a bit different from the version I've always heard.
After some nail-biting, I decided to go with the standard summer-camp melody but print the Allen/Ware/Garrison words, on the assumption that most people should see how the song got started. After further hesitation, I decided to print them without the dialect of the original publication--the editors seem to have played that up somewhat, though it's hard to tell at this distance in years! If you want to see the dialect version, the book is still in print (in a rather ugly facsimile edition).
Lyle isn't going to think much of the way I've chorded this--all those fancy minors. Using them gives the song more of a blues feeling than the feeling of a pure spiritual, which is how we tend to hear it these days. But this was a song sung by slaves--nobody said it should be happy! This is how I do it, after years of versions percolating around in my brain, from Calypso to who- knows-what. If you can forget beating it to death decades ago, it's still a pleasure to sing.
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Complete Lyrics:
Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah!
Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah!
Michael boat a gospel boat...
I wonder where my mother there...
See my mother on the rock goin' home...
On the rock goin' home in Jesus's name...
Michael boat a music boat...
Gabriel blow the trumpet horn...
O you mind your boastin' talk...
Boastin' talk will sink your soul...
Brother, lend a helping hand...
Sister help for trim that boat...
Jordan stream is wide and deep...
Jesus stand on t'oder side...
I wonder if my master there...
My father gone to unknown land...
O the Lord he plant his garden there...
He raise the fruit for you to eat...
He that eat shall never die...
When the river overflow...
O poor sinner, how you land?...
River run and darkness comin'...
Sinner row to save your soul...