#stan rogers

[emilybeemartin]

"And wet rose she from the lake

And fast and fleet went she---

One half the form of a maiden fair

With a jet-black mare's body."

-The Witch of the Westmorland, Stan Rogers

#sketching my latest earworm #stan rogers #sketchbook #centaur #fantasy

[whumpster-fire]

Stan Rogers Songs Categorized By Status Of The Boat

Northwest Passage: The Boat(s) sank a long time ago.

Barrett's Privateers: The Boat sank. It was a terrible boat anyway.

The Flowers Of Bermuda: The Boat sank.

Rolling Down To Old Maui: The Boat didn't sink.

Take It From Day To Day: The Boat didn't sink.

Bluenose: The Boat didn't sink.

White Squall: The Boat didn't sink, but somebody fell off.

The Mary Ellen Carter: The Boat sank, but goddamnit we're gonna unsink it!

Man With Blue Dolphin: The Boat sank again. This poor fool is going to waste his money unsinking it again. What an idiot. This boat is a piece of junk.

The Last Watch: The Boat didn't sink, but it's being broken up for scrap.

The Wreck of the Athens Queen: The Boat sank! Hooray, free stuff for us! (Also we almost sank the boat we used to grab stuff off the boat that sank because we were all drunk)

The Idiot: There are no boats in Edmonton or wherever. This sucks.

#shitpost #folk music #Stan Rogers

[technofinch]

#yeah I need this one today #Stan Rogers

[future-crab]

People who insist on changing the pronouns in songs while they’re singing along are so weak. “But I’m not gay!” Okay?? And I’m not a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s Privateers, but for the length of this song I can be.

#i know in my heart this posts is going to get two notes max but at the end of the day the target audience for this blog is me #sea shanties #barrett’s privateers #stan rogers

[clove-pinks]

Frankin Expedition embroidery showing the route (and eventual shipwreck locations) of HMS Erebus and Terror, with a quote from Stan Rogers' song Northwest Passage. By Anne Blayney, @anniebeeknits on Mastodon.

#franklin expedition #stan rogers #embroidery #fibre arts #hms erebus #hms terror #arctic expedition #arctic #polar #anne blayney #northwest passage #art

[captainsvscaptains]

Battle of the Ships :

Round 1 Part 4 Poll 5

Description for the Argo : Jason and the argonauts sailed this ship

Propaganda for the Argo : It's like, the og fictional ship. Transported Jason and his bros to get a Golden Fleece and they brought back also Medea who then murdered her and Jason’s kids. Legend

Description for the Antelope : Sloop. From the song's lyrics : "the scummiest vessel I'd ever seen" "a sickening sight" "a list to the port & her sails in rags".

Propaganda for the Antelope : She an iconic mess

#battle of the ships #tournament polls #round 1 #argo #the argonauts #argonautica #jason and the argonauts #greek myths #greek mythology #greek mythos #barrett's privateers #stan rogers

[boatmediatourney]

🚢Boat Song Tournament🚢

Round 5A, match 1

Links: 🚢, 🚢

#song tourney r5 #boat media tourney #the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald #gordon lightfoot #the mary ellen carter #mary ellen carter #stan rogers

[thevagabondexpress]

you know those "live laugh love" signs with the cheerful cursive-y lettering? yeah i think i should have a sign like that except it says "fire no guns, shed no tears"

#stan rogers #barrett's privateers #see how long it takes someone to actually read it

[ashton-slashton]

Psychic: *reads my mind*

My mind: The Antelope shook and pitched on her side, how I wish I was in Sherbrooke now! Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs, and the Main truck carried off both me legs. God damn them all! I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold. We'd fire no guns, shed no tears! But I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's Privateers-

Psychic: what the fuck

#it is stuck BADLY in my head guys it came on shuffle on my way home and I'm going insane now #stan rogers

[ofhedgehogsandpumpkins]

Gimme your best Northwest Passage memes, fuck it up like it's 1845.

#northwest passage #stan rogers #canadian folk #is that a tag? #is now

[victusinveritas]

The breakfast porridge was thick yesterday morning. Anyone who has sailed onboard with Europa before will know what that means. The galley team makes no mistakes.

For those who don’t know, thick porridge means big swell. Lotte plans every detail meticulously, so that despite the fact we all stumble along the corridor sideways, still waking up from a night of rolling around the bunkie, our porridge won’t spill over our bowls. Yesterday morning, however, there were other problems. Clara saw the entire porridge bowl sliding across the sticky mat and ran to it’s rescue- as any good deckhand would. But she later told me that there soon were more pressing matters, as she heard a gushing of water and slamming of doors.

It is hard to explain to someone who has not been to sea what 50-knot winds and 9-10 sea-sates look like. Photographs never capture the looming height of waves as they swell past, the screaming wind battering sea spray and rain into your face isn’t even something I noticed until I went back inside and everything was quiet and still. I was hypnotized by the roll, the deep allure of the glassy blue waves topped by light froth as they churn, the occasional patch of serenely still, Mediterranean blue waters, and the railings slipping further into the boiling ocean with each passing wave. While at the helm, the periodic dull thud of water slapping Europa’s hull indefinitely forecasted a showering of seawater.

- Abi, Researcher Read the full story in the Bark Europa's logbook: www.barkeuropa.com/logbook/detail/the-depression

#age of sail #tall ships #bark europa #sailing #high seas #stan rogers

[emilybeemartin]

"I'll sing you a song," this fair maid did cry.

The captain was weeping for joy, oh

She sang it so sweetly, so soft and completely

She sang captain and sailors to sleep, oh

Captain and sailors to sleep.

She robbed them of jewels, she robbed them of wealth,

She robbed them of costly fine fare, oh.

The captain's broadsword she used as an oar

And she rowed her way back to the shore, shore, shore,

She rowed her way back to the shore.

-"The Maid on the Shore," as sung by Solas, though I like the Stan Rogers version, too.

For my senior project in high school, I illustrated this song into a picture book. I always liked it because it's one of the few folk songs where a girl outwits a group of men who want her and still manages to have a happy ending.

#also i realized an EPIC reimagining of this would be an indigenous woman taking back all the bounty the sailors had looted #AWW YISS #the maid on the shore #sketchbook #solas #stan rogers #colored pencil

[whumpster-fire]

I don't know if anyone's brought these songs up in the 'Humans Are Space Orcs' community yet but:

The Mary Ellen Carter by Stan Rogers

and Eight Bells by The Jolly Rogers

are two of the most "humans will pack bond with anything" songs ever in opposite in one way but the same in another way directions.

In "The Mary Ellen Carter:"

A bunch of humans are on a ship. The ship crashed and sank because somebody fucked up (specifically, both of the top two officers in charge were consuming mind altering substances while commanding the ship, in a storm, in an area with rocks. Space Orc move.

The company that owns the ship declared it a total loss, or rather their insurance company did, because it was a relatively old ship. The five guys who were last off the ship and got off at the last moment they possibly could were pissed at this and were like "fuck you, that's our ship now." They decide to salvage the ship anyway, and the narrator sees "She's worth a quarter million afloat and at the dock." I don't know how much a ship (I'm guessing a small-ish freighter or fishing trawler but big enough to have significantly more than five crew) cost in the late 1970s but $250k (Canadian, presumably) sounds not that high, so it really sounds like this is a rationalization to claim what they're doing actually makes economic sense, but if you listen to the song you know it's an act of love. The competency of this salvage operation is dubious. It's five sailors or fishermen on a borrowed barge, which they may well be renting dirt cheap or not paying for at all because one of their buddies owned a barge and agreed that this was a good idea. They have spent months diving to the wreck. Presumably with the bare minimum of training since I don't think diving is a skill sailors tend to have, and the narrator has gotten the bends twice in 60 feet of water so presumably they don't really know what they're doing. But goddamnit, they're going to do it, out of love and out of spite for those corporate bastards who treated the ship they pack bonded with like a disposable object!

...And then in "Eight Bells," there's a ship that's had a long service life, and is now old and worn out and the owners decided to dismantle it for scrap wood. And a bunch of sailors who'd spent half their adult lives on this ship were like "Fuck you, we will not stand for this." And proceeded to steal their (retired) ship from the goddamn harbour, sail her out a ways, and set her on fire and run. Aside from the inherent danger of doing this, it's illegal as hell and considering this one's set in the Age of Sail I'm guessing they could be executed or exiled to Australia or something if they got caught doing this. They're risking their lives on a plan that has absolutely no material benefit to anyone. Why? Because they want their ship to have an honorable death.

Peak Space Orc Behavior, folks.

Yes humans' tendency to pack bond with their ships can be a valuable asset, but do not underestimate their capacity to do irrational, insane things because of that bond.

#humans are space orcs #music #stan rogers #the jolly rogers

[sherbertilluminated]

There are some issues and discourses that Stan Rogers returns to, or at least that's from multiple points of view. We have The Field Behind the Plow and Lies (the agricultural plight from the respective POVs of a husband and wife), The Idiot and Free in the Harbor (young men going west and the towns they leave behind) The Mary Ellen Carter and The Jeannie C (the woman boat I love is gone! What do I do?), and Bluenose and Man with Blue Dolphin (sister ships!). But the most interesting juxtaposition of songs in Stan Rogers' discography, I think, is Northwest Passage and its lesser-known counterpart Take it from Day to Day.

Northwest Passage is one of Stan's most famous songs, and deservedly so: with its rock-quaking harmonies, references to British-Canadian colonial history and meditation on the sublime purpose of Rogers' own career as a traveling musician, the work produces a sense of longing that would be epic if it weren't so futile. While Rogers is ambivalent-at-most about the colonialism inherent in his historical perspective (read: The House of Orange), his choice to focus on the psychological journeys of "the first men through this way" makes projects like the Franklin Expedition sound like exemplary iterations of a universal human journey—these explorers are Just Like You, and their longing for the Northwest Passage is the same, and so is their suffering, so the project itself doesn't sound like an act of colonial violence in Rogers' song. Even the choice to perform Northwest Passage a capella underscores (hehe) the sense of profound isolation that Rogers describes.

But Northwest Passage is a song about captains: men who recognized "the call" to leave their homes for the not-uninhabited Artic expanse and whose journeys make it into the history books. But Take it From Day to Day approaches the Northwest Passage from the opposite direction. Literally.

The song is from the perspective of a common sailor on the St. Roch, the first ship to travel the Northwest Passage west-to-east. And instead of of being overwhelmed by the natural beauty of the Artic or the symbolic resonance of the voyage, he's contemplates more prosaic themes: namely, how much he misses his lover.

It's a little silly to think, as Rogers belts out the chorus—"I'm as far North now as I want to come/but Larson's got us under his thumb/and I signed up for the whole damn run/I can't get off halfway!"—how disappointing this perspective on Artic voyages proves compared to the unfulfilled longing of Northwest Passage. Instead, the unfulfilled longing of the anonymous narrator makes Take if From Day to Day into one of Roger's most sexual songs. I beg you to listen to it, if only to count the sensual metaphors and double-entendres.

But whether you have heard Northwest Passage and love it, or you're interested in a more down-to-earth perspective on Ice, I think it's a song you might enjoy.

#if you've just finished #the terror #and want to be deconditioned to fear the artic #it can do that too #stan rogers #northwest passage #take it from day to day #from coffee house to concert hall #artic exploration #sea shanties #not being on boats #songs within words #Youtube

[bestfictionaldivorce]

#again this is for shits and giggles #r.e.m. #the tragically hip #gordon lightfoot #stan rogers #barenaked ladies #bruce cockburn #dar williams #heather dale #the decemberists #loreena mckennitt #music

[clove-pinks]

I can understand a promise to cruise for American gold and "shed no tears;" but expecting to "fire no guns" is at odds with the premise of privateering. Like, you know what privateer ships do, right? There are usually guns involved, lots of them.

#barrett's privateers #stan rogers