Zarf Updates

A couple of months ago, I posted this on the sociality:

Every once in a while I listen to “Hog-Eye Man”, a fine sea shanty. Lots of versions online:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfMhy-Er-_Y [Martin Carthy]
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCIM_shahkI [The Longest Johns]

But... it’s noted as one of the filthiest shanties ever collected.

Of course, every published and recorded version is cleaned up! Ass-cheeks and bit of double entendre are all that remain. (Maybe the N-word if you go back to 1960.)

https://mainlynorfolk.info/watersons/songs/hogeyeman.html

I have been curious about the truly filthy original version for years. Never found it.

[@zarfeblong, Mastodon post, July 14, 2024]

If you follow that Mainly Norfolk link, you'll see an amazing number of quotes about how unprintable the original was, but nothing about what the unprintable lyrics actually were. Such a folk-tease!

This is one of the Shanties where authors seem to be obsessed about obscenity. Whall: “much of this shanty is unprintable”; Terry: “Of the infinite number of verses to this fine tune hardly one is printable”; Colcord: “None of the versions can be printed in anything like their entirety”; Hugill: “Many other shanties were just as obscene, and even worse.”

[Quoted from the notes to an album called Short Sharp Shanties Vol. 3, 2012. Performance on that album sung by Jackie Oates.]

So, cutting to the chase, I've found some of the original "unprintable" text. But not all.

Obvious content warning! The rest of this post will have lots of crude language. Mostly genitalia slang. Racial slurs. The F-word will be deployed.

Now, I know this is mostly a gaming blog. I sometimes go freewheeling off into folk songs and other topics as may grab my interest. I hope you're along for that ride! But a blast of sailors' language may be more than you signed up for. Furthermore, I'm syndicated on Planet-IF (an IF news aggregator) and going blue there would really be bad manners.

Therefore, just this once, the full text of this post will not appear in my RSS feed. (I had to tweak my blog software to allow this! Yay writing your own tools.)

If you're reading this on Planet-IF or your RSS reader, please continue to my web site for the full post.

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Welcome back, and back to the story.

The hunt

How far back can we go with "Hog-Eye"? Here's the earliest shanty recording I'm aware of, from Ian Campbell in 1964:

It is, of course, squeaky-clean. The album notes say:

Though familiar to British seamen, this song, used mainly for capstan work, was probably made in America. It’s still a favourite there, evidently, for the folklorist Vance Randolph found several versions current among Missouri hill-folk nearly a thousand miles from the sea. Alas, Randolph’s versions remain in manuscript, locked away in a Sex Research Institute in Indiana. The version here – melody, at least – was taken down in the 1860s.

It's easy to find shanty sources for this. The above version is straight from Ships, Sea Songs, and Shanties, W. B. Whall, 1913 (Internet Archive link). The song is also found in Shanties from the Seven Seas, Stan Hugill, 1961 (Internet Archive link). Again, these are cleaned-up versions, although the collectors go on how crude the originals were -- see quotes above.

Mind you, one word was not censored back then. The Ian Campbell performance has the line "Railroad navvy with his sea-boots on", but both Whall and Hugill make clear that the original had a different N-word. This was very much a Negro shanty, sung by and about.

I'm a white guy writing in 2024. This post will be full of fucks and pricks and cunts, but I'm going to bleep "n_____" for the duration.

Anyhow, "locked away in a Sex Research Institute in Indiana" is a great line. (Not to mention the plot of someone's great unwritten Sculder fanfic.) I seriously began to consider the possibility of a field trip to the Kinsey Institute to locate this document.

Start where you can, though. I took a look through the Kinsey Institute Library Catalog to see exactly what manuscript the comment might refer to. Here's the search results for "Vance Randolph":

1. "Unprintable" folklore? : the Vance Randolph Collection
2. "Unprintable" songs from the Ozarks / collected by Vance Randolph
3. Americans who thought they were Gods : colorful Messiahs and litlte Christs
4. Bawdy elements in the Ozark speech
5. Pissing in the snow and other Ozark folk tales
6. Vulgar rhymes from the Ozarks
7. Truth About Frankie and Johnny : and other legendary lovers who stalked across the American scene
8. Pissing in the snow and other Ozark folktales
9. Pissing in the snow and other Ozark folktales
10. A reporter in the Ozarks : a close-up of a picturesque and unique phase of American life
11. Wild stories from the Ozarks
12. Folk-lore collections
13. Roll me in your arms : unprintable Ozark folksongs and folklore

...Wait, Pissing in the Snow? I have that book!

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The mountains

Sometime in the 1990s, poring over the used-book tables at a convention -- it might have been a Balticon -- I saw this little volume of folklore peeking out from between the trashy paperbacks.

(This is not an assumption. All used sci-fi paperbacks in the 1990s were trashy. Some of them were great but they were all trash. I was delighted to see, in my visit to Powell's last month, that they have a spinner set up specifically displaying the kind of trashy used paperbacks that I gorged on in those heady post-college years. Jessica Amanda Salmonson! Marion Zimmer Bradley! Sorry, tangent, never mind.)

Of course I bought Pissing in the Snow. In fact I later bought a second copy for lending. If memory serves, there were copies on lots of used-book tables in those years. I never found out why. Maybe somebody remaindered a crate of them.

We're talking here about a collection of dirty jokes, or dirty funny stories anyway. Vance Randolph collected them in the Ozark region from 1920-1950.

The humor in this story comes out of the different definitions applied to the word “diddle.” In this respect, it is related to Number 49 of this collection, “It Was a Tee-Hee.” [annotation by Frank A. Hoffman]

Just to give you the idea.

So I was aware of Vance Randolph, but I'd never made the connection to the comment about "Hog-Eye Man".

Great! Only that book didn't answer the question. "Hog-Eye" is a song, not a folk tale; it's not mentioned in Pissing in the Snow.

But I've got a title, right? Roll Me in Your Arms: Unprintable Ozark Folksongs and Folklore. Maybe I should search around for that.

Shoulda done that months ago! The Internet Archive has a copy available for borrowing.

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The goods

What we find is, honestly, not all that shocking.

I mean, it's way out of bounds if you're not allowed to write "fuck" or mention boners in a published book. But it's not 1960 any more. In fact it's 1992, the date on this Randolph collection. This is just talking (singing) openly about sex.

Somewhere in an interview whose link I've lost, Hugill explains that sailors don't do double entendres.

Which is not to say that there aren't hidden meanings. "Sifting sand" (or meal or ash), the book explains, is a euphemism for sex motions.

[Mr. L. J. of Farmington, Arkansas] said that “Sifting Sand” is an old-time dance step. In it the dancers move their bodies sideways, and the more daring girls shake their hips from side to side, in the immemorial imitation of well-practised sexual intercourse of dancers [...]

As to sifting sand, in an American stereotype joke, collected first about 1940: The hillbilly brings his new bride back to her father the morning after the wedding night. “What’s the matter, Zeke,” the father asks, “weren’t she a virgin?” “I dunno,” says the hillbilly; “I s’pose that up-an’-down motion comes natural, but that there round-an’-round, side-to-side, cinder-shiftin’ motion was LEARNED!”

[Randolph vol 1, p401; annotation by Gershon Legman, I'm pretty sure]

(Picture holding a sieve full of sand, and swirling it around horizontally to work it. Now picture doing that with your hips. Hubba hubba.)

You can track individual bowdlerizations: "born and bred in Tennessee" was originally "a prick from here to Tennessee". Or, "with his sea-boots on" used to be "with a hard-on on". The "golden hair hanging down to her knees," well, I had a good guess about that one long before I found this book.

Really, my favorite "dirty" verse is still this, which made it into the Hugill book and most of the performed versions you'll hear:

I guess that proves I'm not a sailor.

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So what's a hog-eye, anyhow?

Oh, what a question.

Whall says without hesitation that "hog-eyes" were river barges in the Gold Rush era:

This shanty dates from 1849-50. At that time gold was found in California. There was no road across the continent, and all who rushed to the goldfields (with few exceptions) went in sailing-ships round the Horn, San Francisco being the port they made for. This influx of people and increase of trade brought railway building to the front; most of the “navvies” were negroes. But until the roads were made there was a great business carried on by water, the chief vehicles being barges, called “hog-eyes.” The derivation of the name is unknown to me.

[Whall, p118]

Hugill supports that and adds a detail:

A ‘Ditch-Hog’ was a sarcastic phrase used by American deep-watermen to denote sailors of inland waterways such as the Mississippi and Missouri as opposed to foreign-going Johns.

[Hugill, p268]

Vance Randolph's book, however, is having none of that. In Ozark country, hog-eye is pussy.

Hog-Eye means, gallantly, the vagina, not to be confused with “dead-eye,” meaning the anus.

[Randolph vol 1, p401; annotation by Gershon Legman]

McAtee, Rural Dialect of Grant County, Indiana, Supplement 1 (1942) p. 7, defines pig’s eye as a “euphemistic name for the very prevalent symbol for the female pudendum, an upright diamond with a longitudinal slit in the middle.” [...] Professor R. L. Ramsay, Our Storehouse of Missouri Place-Names (Columbia, Missouri, 1952) p. 111, says that “apparently the term hog-eye once signified in Missouri a small compact place sunk in a hollow.” Not very flattering for the vagina.

[Randolph vol 1, p403; annotation by Gershon Legman]

Green’s Dictionary of Slang agrees, although, to be fair, two of their three references are Randolph's book. The third is "Men Fooler Blues", sung by Jack Kelly & His South Memphis Jug Band. (Not clear if "1932-1939" refers to the band or the album.)

The Hog-Eye Man is therefore either a riverboat barge worker, or a cunt-chaser. Or, of course, both:

“Hog-Eye Man” means a wharf roustabout or idler, usually Negro, who is always “just hangin’ around,” looking for appetizing kitchen hand-outs and especially for sexual opportunities; often called “Jody” (the adulterer) in and since World War II, in Negro “toasts” and brag-songs.

[Randolph vol 1, p401; annotation by Gershon Legman]

(From the same paragraph as his comment about the gallant vagina.)

The interesting question is which came first. Or, the question I've skated past, how did we wind up collecting sea shanty lyrics in upland Arkansas? Hugill thinks it started there:

This shanty probably started life as a railroad work-song (many railroad navvies were Negroes), then taken over by the ‘river boys’ and finally, by way of the cotton hoosiers of the Gulf Ports, passed into the hands of deep-water sailormen.

[Hugill, p271]

Hugill doesn't try to explain, if a "hog-eye" is a boat, how the song got started on the railroads. So that's a point for Randolph's version.

It's true that the Ozark versions collected by Randolph aren't nautical at all. No rowing, no boats. But then there's a quote from Carl Sandburg about a "Hog-Eye" song:

A lusty and lustful song developed by negroes of South Carolina, who had it from sailors originally, is Hog-Eye. In themes it is primitive, anatomical, fierce of breath, aboriginal rather than original.

[The American Songbag, Carl Sandburg, p380]

It's not obviously the same song, except for the chorus: "Row the boat ashore with a hog-eye"! (Randolph, too, mentions inland versions with the chorus as "Rodybodysho".) And "row the boat ashore" is deep-water sailor talk. So did "Hog-Eye" start on the high seas and go inland after all? Or was there a back-and-forth transmission?

All these folk songs get mixed around, swap verses and choruses with each other, hybridize like mad. Remember I said the 1964 Ian Campbell was the first shanty recording I'd found? I was skipping over this 1928 recording from Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers:

This is an entirely different melody -- it's a fiddle dance tune -- but it's in some kind of close lyrics exchange with the song we know. There's also one called Soldier's Joy in the mix.

Speaking of expurgation: spot the word that got changed along the way! If you've gotten this far, you don't need me to tell you:

Bowdlerization doesn't just erase the original lyrics from history; it can confuse the meaning of what is preserved. Think back to the "hog-eye". (Remember the hog-eye? This here's a song about the hog-eye...) Quite a few modern renditions throw "hog-eye" around as if it were a nonsense word to replace "n_____":

This would make no sense to the original Ozark singers. (A meaningful substitution would be "navvy".)

The chorus line also gets mixed around: is it "Row the boat ashore with a hog-eye", or "for a hog-eye", or "his / her hog-eye"...? Most people who have recorded the song don't think about the difference. It's possible that the "original" intended meaning was "Go ashore to get laid", but at this distance we'll never know.

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The end

Vance Randolph died in 1980. His "unprintable" collection saw the light just twelve years later, edited by Gershon Legman, who supplied many of the editorial notes quoted above. "G. Legman" would be a great pseudonym for this stuff, but it's a real name. Oh well. Legman's introduction begins:

The notion that there is, or ever was some special kind of folklore or folksong that is unprintably erotic of "bawdy" or "dirty" or "blue" is essentially an optical illusion.

[Randolph vol 1, p1; Gershon Legman's introduction]

It goes on to discuss the ways that bawdy material is separated out by collectors. In some sense these stories become taboo only when they're separated from the people who originally tell them. That's a whole anthropological subject, of course.

Vance Randolph never intended originally to collect or create any special volumes of "unprintable" Ozark folklore. To the contrary, in the forty principled years of his collecting, from about 1915 to 1955, in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri, he purposely and consciously avoided directing or choosing the materials his singers and informants gave him, or being in any other way a disturbing, falsifying element.

[Randolph vol 1, p2; Gershon Legman's introduction]

Maybe the invention of an "Institute for Sex Research" was necessary for such a manuscript to survive, until our modern enlightened (ha!) age could get it into print.

Pissing In the Snow, in contrast, was published in Randolph's lifetime -- 1977. It was a mass-market publication, not an academic work; and widely read, as my used-book experience attests. That work had the heroic assistance and support of Rayna Green of the Smithsonian. Roll Me in Your Arms is dedicated to her.

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Not the end

So is that it? Have we come to the end of the unprintable Hog-Eye?

No, by Klono's gadolinium guts, we have not. Because Stan Hugill also had a collection of "unprintable" material that didn't make it into his published shanty books. But unlike Randolph, Hugill's collection has never seen the light of day.

Randolph quotes some of Hugill's verses (see p403) but skips at least seven. He also mentions -- but does not quote -- several more Sally-in-the-garden lyrics that turn up in other songs.

In his introduction to Randolph's book, Gershon Legman claims to have this unprintable Hugill manuscript:

It should perhaps be mentioned here that the unexpurgated sea-shanty texts of Stan Hugill, the last of the shantymen, were all excluded from his books, as they have been from every other pussyfooting sea-shanty book openly published in English since the 1880s. They are now therefore at their very last chance ever to be recorded and preserved, as entrusted to me by Hugill in the late 1950s in manuscript as “Sailing Ship Shanties,” just as were Vance Randolph’s equally “Unprintable” Ozark materials.

The intention and specific request of both men to me then was that I should undertake to publish at least a sampling of their unique materials (if separate full publication could not be achieved), in my own very large historical collection, The Ballad: Unexpurgated Folksongs, American and British, of the Twentieth Century. This is still forthcoming [...]

[Randolph vol 1, p18; Gershon Legman's introduction]

Legman himself died in 1999. The Ballad never forthcame. The unpublished Hugill manuscript disappeared.

The Internet Archive has the title page and index of this collection, along with some associated correspondence -- but not the complete manuscript. It's a meager 32 pages. The only bit of "Hog-Eye" quoted (pp7-8) are the two lines about "jiggers in his bollocks".

The fact that somebody scanned those few pages of index and letters implies that maybe the rest got scanned too? But it's nowhere.

I was going to end this post with a beautiful full-circle closure: I was considering a visit to the Kinsey Institute after all. Not for Vance Randolph, but for the lost Hugill manuscript. But according to this forum thread, someone already asked in 2016, and it's not there. Dammit!

Real life sucks for closure.

Sources

• Hugill, Stan, Shanties from the Seven Seas, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1961, pp268-271 (IA link)
• Randolph, Vance, Pissing in the Snow, Avon Books, 1976 (IA link)
• Randolph, Vance, Roll Me in Your Arms: “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore (Volume I), University of Arkansas Press, 1992, pp401-404 (IA link)
• — (Volume 2), ditto, pp647-649 (IA link)
• Sandburg, Carl, The American Songbag, Harcourt Brace & Co, 1927, p380 (IA link)
• Terry, Richard Runciman, The Shanty Book (Part 1), J. Curwen & Sons, 1921, p24 (IA link)
• Whall, W. B., Ships, Sea Songs, and Shanties, James Brown & Son, 1913, p118 (IA link)

I have copied the most relevant sections of these (the Randall, Whall, and Hugill pages) from the Internet Archive onto my own web site, along with text transcriptions. Read them here.