Aboard The Cutty Sark

Recorded on board the Cutty Sark on the evening of Monday June 11th 1979 during, and by courtesy of, the Greenwich Festival. From the back of the sleeve: "The singing of sea shanties as working songs at sea is a lost art. It died with the last of the British Cape Horners, and Stan Hugill, at the age of 73, must now be not only the last shantyman alive, but a primary source of information. That we were able to record him aboard the Cutty Sark, who in her heyday was to make her name in the hardest ocean road of all the seven seas, running her easting down in the "Roaring Forties", and rounding the Horn in the worst weather Father Neptune knew how to throw at her, we are indebted to the London Borough of Greenwich, without whose help this recording would not have been made possible. Settle back and listen then, not only to an album of sea shanties, but to a lecture on life and traditions at sea from the man who experienced it all first hand; indeed the master. Nobody could do the job better; very soon nobody could do it at all."