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Joanna Colcord
was born March 12, 1882, in the South Seas on the bark Charlotte
A. Littlefield, out of Searsport, Maine, of which her father was
captain.
"Up to the age of eighteen she spent most of her girlhood at
sea on board her father’s command, sailing on China voyages;
and from this experience she acquired, as if by nature, the
essential feeling of ships and the sea. Throughout her youth
she lived constantly in an atmosphere of seafaring, in a
setting of ocean days, knowing none but the men and women of
the sea, seeing nothing but ships and ports about the world,
hearing no speech but the nautical vernacular."
Lincoln
Colcord’s "Introduction" to Joanna C. Colcord, Songs of
American Sailormen (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), p. 20-21.
Joanna
Colcord’s love for the songs of the sailorman grew directly out
of these childhood experiences. She says:
"I still recall the thrill of hearing the crew of a British
ship lying beside us in Shanghai sing the old shanty "Goodbye,
Fare Ye Well", as they heaved up anchor, and of comprehending
for the first time that this was beautiful and distinctive
music."
Joanna Colcord,
"Childhood At Sea An Early Education In The Realities Of
Life," Portland Sunday Telelgram and Sunday Press Herald, July
12, 1936.
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Joanna Colcord.
Photo courtesy of Special Collections, Fogler Library,
University of Maine. |
Colcord was a
very well-educated woman. She earned a Master’s Degree in
Chemistry from the University of Maine and attended the New York
School of Philanthropy. She worked for the Russell Sage
Foundation and other philanthropic organizations in New York
City between 1911 and 1944, in addition to documenting sailor’s
songs. In 1950, when Colcord was 68 years old, she got married
for the first time to a longtime friend, Frank John Bruno, and
moved with him to St. Louis, Missouri, where she died in 1960.
In 1922 Colcord
began collecting American songs of the sea. She remembers how
this came about:
"I went to dinner with some publisher friends, and although I
knew nothing of musical notation, came away pledged to begin
the research which led to the publication two years later, in
1924, of "Roll and Go," a collection of American songs of the
sea; and which has ever since furnished a hobby and an
interesting use for leisure time."
From: Joanna
Colcord, "Childhood At Sea An Early Education In The Realities
Of Life," Portland Sunday Telelgram and Sunday Press Herald,
July 12, 1936.
About the songs
in Roll and Go, Colcord says:
"The
following examples of these work-songs of the sea are drawn in
part from my own memories of the years spent on blue water
under sail from 1890 to 1899, mostly on voyages between New
York and various ports in the China Sea. In part, they are
songs learned from my father, who loved them and sang them
well, and whose seagoing began about the year 1874. This makes
my versions of the songs later than the "classical" period of
shanty-singing, which extended from about 1840 up to the time
of the Civil War. I also owe grateful acknowledgement to many
shanty-singers still alive, whose names will be found
elsewhere, and from whose lips I have taken down many of the
songs that follow."
Joanna C.
Colcord, Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen
(Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1924)
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