Casual Music-Making

As early as 1603 there was the music of stringed instruments on Cape Ann, or at least off its shores.  Capt. Martin Pring sailed by, and said that "we had a youth in our company that could play upon a Gitterne."  The gitterne was an ancestor of both the guitar and the zither.  When Pring went ashore farther down the coast, near today's Plymouth, the native people "took great delight" in this "homely Musicke," gave the musician presents of "Tobacco-pipes" and "snakes skinnes of sixe foot long."  They danced "twentie in a ring, and the Gitterne in the middle of them."

Two centuries later in Watson's youth there was still no radio, no recorded music.  Americans entertained themselves mainly by voice, with a few wind and string instruments, and mostly with music that went along with their working, socializing, and practicing for war.

Gloucester, Massachusetts saw a good deal of each of these forms of amateur, casual, extemporaneous music-making.  Gloucester ashore had all the characteristics of the a small New England town of the early 19th Century.  Religion was a strong force at the time, but the churches contributed little to the musical experience of the town. The Congregational churches, descended from Puritanism, were beginning to accommodate a wider range of hymn singing to supplant the old psalmodies.  There were no organs in the churches, and no skilled organists.  The young Universalist church as an exception.  It had acquired a barrel organ, reportedly as the gift of Capt. John Somes who, in his capacity as a privateer, had "liberated" it from a British merchantman on the high seas.  Barrel organs were popular in English parish churches at the time.  The only skill required to operate the instrument was the ability to turn a crank.  For information and photos of church barrel organs, visit the

But Gloucester did not have to rely on its choir lofts for music.  It was also a fishing port and a trading port, and this window on the world brought in exotic varieties of music over the corridors of the sea.  Think sea music and you think chanteys (or shanties, as they were also spelled). 

While chanteys could be heard carrying over the water from the great square-rigged merchant vessels that sometimes entered the port, these work songs were not typical of Gloucester.  Traditional popular songs were heard more often along the waterfront and aboard the vessels.  Ballads, too, in their old meaning as traditional rhyming tales passed down from times before written music was common currency.  Crewmen with long memories would belt out verse after verse for the entertainment of others off-watch in the fo'c'sle.

Ballads might be recited, or sung, or hummed in sing-song.  Gloucester's Procter Brothers, in addition to the maritime lore they collected in The Fishermen's Memorial and Record Book and The Fishermen's Own Book, published in 1874 a collection of old and new ballads in Fishermen's Ballads and Songs of the Sea, with George Procter's Preface illustrated here.  One of the ballads in this collection, "The Ghostly Crew," does list an author - Harry L. Marcy.  Marcy tells his otherworldly tale economically in understated colloquial style, wrapping up the dramatic revelation of the tale in two brisk stanzas.

The music of Gloucester in the 1840s was essentially traditional:  traditional hymns, traditional parade ground marches, traditional sea ballads, traditional tunes from England, Scotland and Ireland like "Annie Laurie" and "Auld Lang Syne."  With an occasional new tune mixed in.  And a waterfront fiddler to make the melodies go merrier - that was the role in which John Watson got his start.