Joanna Colcord: The Woman Who Saved the Chanteys
Colcord is a featured subject of A Woman's Way, my program of women explorers, adventurers, and songcatchers whose contributions to maritime culture the history books have consistently underweighted. And she has her own home on the web now at joannacolcord.com — where you'll find the interactive maps, timelines, song checklists, and bibliography I've built up over years of research, along with information about booking Chanteys from the Colcord Collection for your library, historical society, or concert series.
What draws me to Colcord — and keeps drawing me back — is that her authority was genuinely embodied. She didn't collect the chanteys from a library. She heard them sung across still water in Shanghai harbor, watched the crews of working square-riggers heave up sail, and grew up in the after cabin of a ship where the rhythm of the watch determined when you could make noise and when you couldn't. Her brother Lincoln wrote in his introduction to the revised 1938 edition that she had acquired the essential feeling of ships and the sea as if by nature. That's not romantic biography. That's the reason her collection holds up.
Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen appeared in 1924 — two years ago was its centennial. The expanded edition followed in 1938. Between the two volumes, Colcord documented 117 songs, organized by functional category: short drag, halyard, capstan and windlass, forebitter. What makes the notation remarkable is that she taught herself musical transcription specifically to do this work. She had no formal training in it. The sheet music in those books is another form of her voice — careful, precise, and unmistakably rooted in firsthand experience. She knew what each song was for and which rope it was sung to.
My own contribution to her legacy is a complete set of abc notation and MIDI transcriptions of every song in the collection, freely downloadable at joannacolcord.com. If you want to hear how "Rio Grande" or "The Dreadnaught" actually sounded on the water — as close as we can get — that's where to start.
The sea songs that went viral on TikTok in 2020, the ones filling festival stages from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Essex, Connecticut — they passed through Colcord's hands first. Stan Hugill, who spent his life on the same tradition, called her "a woman, but a regular seaman if ever there was one." The qualifier is dated. The respect is real.
If you're looking for a Women's History Month program — or any program that puts maritime music and women's history in the same room — I'd love to talk. Program details and booking at joannacolcord.com and crosscurrents.lynnoel.com.
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