Music: A Nickel in the Piccolo

When the 250-ton fishing boat Barnegat put out of Beaufort, N.C. for the menhaden*grounds one morning last winter, she carried some visitors who had never made the trip before. They were Bendix engineers, on board to check on the Barnegat’s electronic “fish-finder.” The reports from the finder came through just fine and the boat closed on a big school of fish. Then, as the Barnegat’s 20 fishermen began to haul in their first good catch of the day, the engineers heard something that made them look up from their graphs in wonder and surprise.

“Put a nickel in the piccolo!” cried one of the fishermen. Thereupon, following their song leader, they broke into a high, happy chantey. The Bendix men had never heard anything quite like it before.

Ashore again, they convinced NBC that the chanteys were worth recording. This summer, sniffing an “untapped source of American folk music,” NBC sent its special events reporter W. W. Chaplin out on the Barnegat with a tape recorder to get some of the songs down for posterity. By that time, following the season north, the Barnegat was working out of Little Egg Harbor, NJ.

Chaplin learned that there are about 100 songs that “belong to the business.” Nobody knows how old the songs are. Among the menhaden fishermen, most of them Negroes from the tidewater South, the chanteys have been handed down from father to son, from crew to crew. Chaplin also learned from the Barnegat’s song leader, Walter Kegler of Fernandina, Fla., that menhaden fishermen are picked “almost as much for their music as their muscles.” The singing has two functions, Kegler explained: it provides a rhythmic pulse for hauling in the seine, and it is “thanksgiving” for a good haul (“No need singing when the catch is small”).

On a coast-to-coast hookup last week NBC broadcast what Chaplin had heard. To most listeners, the menhaden fishermen’s chants, more religious than piscatorial in flavor, had a good deal in common with the best of Negro “spirituals,” but they also had a fresh, saltwater tang all their own. Sample (the Barnegat’s favorite chant):

Wine, wine, wine

Oh, my Lord,

Ought to been to Heaven ten thousand

years—

Dririkin’ of the wine.

I gotta mother

In the Promised Land,

Bye ‘n bye

III shake her hand.

Ought to been to Heaven ten thousand

years—

Drinkin’ of the wine.

Up on the mountain

When Jehovah spoke,

Out of his mouth

Come fire and smoke.

Ought to been to Heaven ten thousand

years—

Drinkin’ of the wine.

*A small (about 1 lb.), bony member of the herring family, the menhaden is the U.S.’s No. 1 commercial fish. Unpalatable, menhaden are valuable for oil (soap and paint), stock and poultry feeds, fertilizers. Massachusetts Indians showed the Pilgrims how to use them: plant a menhaden in every hill of corn.