From the mid 2000s until 2020, Granddaddy Smith toured the East Coast, singing maritime work songs from the Northern Neck, a peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Some of his buddies had invited him to manage this group, founded by William Hudnall in 1991. Granddaddy, the church treasurer of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in White Stone and a member of its men’s chorus, fit the groups’ needs nicely. He, the son of a fisherman, and the other five men, all retired African American menhaden fishermen, would visit schools and festivals, sharing a relic of the past that survived long after most of the fishermen in the region were replaced by automated systems. Beaming about the music, Grandaddy said, “When I got into it, I was carried away.”

Chanteys, sung in unison, allowed fishermen to coordinate their efforts as well as keep their minds off the tedious and backbreaking work. Engaging in this call-and-response work-song tradition, they would convey the wide range of their lived experiences: difficulties of their hard labor, critiques of their bosses, gratitude to the fish, supplications to God, and odes to the women they loved and missed when out at sea for weeks on end. Interestingly, there are various spellings of “chantey/chanteys” including “chanty/chanties” and “shanty/shanties” because the word was spoken long before it was ever written. (While the origin of the word is up for debate, “chantey” could come from the French chanter—“to sing”—or from English “to chant.”) Though the term has now come to describe any song sung upon the ocean, experts have noted that when referring to the seafaring work-song tradition, as those performed by my grandfather’s group, “chantey” is apt.

Granddaddy Smith’s favorite chantey is “Won’t You Help Me to Raise ’Em.” When the group performs this song, they show the audience how the fisherman would’ve pulled up the heavy net in unison. The leader calls out “Won’t you help me to raise ’em, boys,” and then the rest of the crew responds with the sweet resonances of their multiple voices “Hey, hey, honey” before tugging with all their might. Hearing this haunting chorus, it’s easy to imagine the music and lyrics imbuing the fishermen with enough strength to haul in their catch. 

Before I started to research the Chantey Singers, I had never heard Granddaddy sing. As I watched a Library of Congress recording of him, he delivered the solo for what would become my favorite chantey, “Remember Me.” In his smooth baritone, he sang “Remember me / remember me / oh Lordy / remember me.”

As one of the only high-paying jobs available for Black men in the region, many fishermen toiled on the sea. Some met their deaths there. For instance, in 1938, when Granddaddy was 12, his father perished at sea in a violent hurricane. His body, never recovered. “Remember Me” was like a dirge, calling on the Lord to ensure their sacrifice would not be forgotten. In singing it, Granddaddy pays homage to all the men claimed by the sea while also carrying on his father’s legacy. 

My grandfather, however, took a different career path. Drafted into the Army in 1945, he returned to Virginia after World War II to finish high school and attend college at Virginia Union University. In 1973, after a career in teaching and school administration, he became the first Black superintendent of an integrated school district in Virginia. And because of his contributions to education, Virginia University of Lynchburg awarded him an honorary doctorate of pedagogy in 2003.

While he did not become a fisherman, respecting his mother’s wishes of staying away from the treacherous waters, my grandfather—the consummate educator—found a way to engage with his father’s memory by teaching the public the historical value of these songs. “The average individual doesn’t know about the fish that are in these waters, and so the public asks lots of questions,” he said. “I imagine I was perfect for this.”

Elton Smith, Jr., the son of a fisherman lost at sea, and described by scholar and granddaughter Maya Angela Smith, right, as “a consummate educator,” has dedicated his life to preserving the sea chanteys of Black fishermen. Photo by Emily Smith.

And he was, telling the stories of African Americans who worked the seas. As I reflect on the recent surge of interest in sea chanteys (earlier this year, Scottish musician Nathan Evans’s performance of one quickly garnered more than 1.8 million views on TikTok), I’m struck by the assumption that this is primarily a white British folk tradition. According to Pomona College music professor Gibb Schreffler in a revealing article on chanteys, however, “the epicenter of the chanty song genre was not Great Britain, as is sometimes imagined, but rather America—or, more precisely, the western side of the ‘Black Atlantic,’ rimmed by Southern U.S. ports and the Caribbean.” The work of the Northern Neck Chantey Singers and groups like them is thus crucial for expanding our understanding of this musical genre because it decenters whiteness and allows for the diversity inherent in the chantey tradition to shine through.

In fact, chanteys are a global phenomenon with highly localized inflections. While all the songs revolve around work at sea, different regions have different music and words. Even the chanteys specific to menhaden fishermen boast a wide variation. “In North Carolina, they have some of the same songs but the music is a little different,” Grandaddy Smith explained. “In Virginia, the lyrics talk about specific bodies of water such as Chesapeake Bay or the Rappahannock River. In New Jersey, fellows would come up with music to fit that particular water.” These chanteys provide us with a geographical snapshot of what life was like for Black menhaden fishermen.

For my grandfather and people like him, these songs represent more than a history of cooperation, nostalgia, and resilience among fishermen. They are also more than the latest online fad helping people survive the isolation that a global pandemic has wrought. They represent a valuable, if little-known, aspect of Black cultural history.

Unfortunately, the Northern Neck Chantey Singers have not performed since early 2020. The COVID pandemic is partially to blame, but the aging of these cultural stewards represents an even greater challenge. All of the current members are in their 90s. “I enjoyed going out of state. I miss it a lot,” my grandfather lamented, “but I’m too old now. Life on the road is difficult these days.”

It is unclear what will happen to the group once the world returns to some semblance of normalcy. But given how very few groups exist that perform African American maritime folk music, if the Northern Neck Chantey Singers disband, it would be a major cultural loss.

The post A People’s Song Upon the Waters appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From 2012 to 2017, Blatty, a New Orleans-based photographer, drove to small towns and villages on the bayous to document a way of life that is rapidly disappearing. The causes of this decline include the growth of the city of New Orleans and its levees, the hurricanes, and the oil industry. In Blatty’s evocative photos, though, these communities are very much alive: You can smell the mud of the marshes, the shrimp and crabs piled up to be sold, and the oil powering the motorboats. And in quotations from the individuals she photographed you can feel their love and longing for family, tradition, and place.

In the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we’ve become aware of the intermittent extreme dangers faced by these communities. Blatty’s work, as collected in Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities, published by George F. Thompson Publishing and distributed by University of Virginia Press, shows the everyday precariousness of their world.

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Yet ancient fisher folk and their communities have almost entirely escaped scholarly study. Why? Such communities held their knowledge close to their chests and seldom gave birth to powerful monarchs or divine rulers. And they conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next by word of mouth, not writing.

That knowledge remains highly relevant today. Fishers are people who draw their living from a hard, uncontrollable world that is perfectly indifferent to their fortunes or suffering. Many of them still fish with hooks, lines, nets, and spears that are virtually unchanged since the Ice Age.

The world’s first pre-industrial communities emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean around 3100 B.C. Other states developed independently, somewhat later, in Asia and in the Americas. The entire superstructure of the pre-industrial state, whether Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman, Cambodian, or Inca, depended on powerful ideologies that propelled the efforts of thousands of anonymous laborers, who served on great estates, built temples, tombs, and public buildings, and produced the rations that fed not only the ruler but also his armies of officials. Some of the most important were the fishers, who, along with farmers, were the most vital of all food purveyors.

As city populations grew, fish became a commodity, harvested by the thousands. Fishers transported their catches to small towns and then cities, bringing fish to markets and temples. For the first time, some communities became virtually full-time fishers, bartering or selling fish in town and village markets in exchange for other necessities. Their catches were recorded and taxed. In time, too, fish became rations of standard size, issued to noble and commoner alike. The ruler and the state required hundreds, even thousands, of skilled and unskilled laborers. Their work might be a form of taxation, but the king had to support them in kind, often with fish.

The Land of the Pharaohs depended heavily on its fisher folk. Nile River catfish were easy to harvest, especially during the spring spawn, before they were gutted and dried in the tropical sun on large racks. The authorities assigned teams of fishers to catch specific quotas within set periods, especially when the flood was receding. Large seine nets provided much of the catch, deployed and hauled in by teams of villagers.

The demand was enormous. Building the Pyramids of Giza alone required thousands of people. The workers’ settlement lay close to the royal tombs. In 1991, the Egyptologist Mark Lehner excavated two bakeries, including the vats for mixing dough and a cache of the large bell-shaped pots used for baking bread. A huge mud brick building next to bakeries contained troughs, benches, and tens of thousands of tiny fish fragments in the fine ashy deposit covering the floor.

The fresh catches had to be dried and preserved immediately. Lehner believes that the fish were laid out on reed frames to dry on well-ventilated troughs and benches in a production line that provided protein for thousands of people. At its peak, the line must have employed hundreds of people and processed thousands of fish per day—precise estimates are impossible. The fishers were thus only the first stage of an infrastructure of hundreds of people needed to process and store the dried catch for later consumption. The demands of this operation must have led to large, temporary fishing villages springing up at the same general locations every flood season.

The Ancient Egyptians were not alone. Mid-19th-century travelers, who crossed the Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia after the monsoon as the water was falling, reported catfish teeming so thickly under their canoes that one could almost walk across the water on their backs. The ancestors of these large fish fed thousands of Khmer laborers as they built the nearby stupendous temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in the 12th century.

On the other side of the world, along the arid North Coast of Peru, the inshore anchovy fisheries, nourished by natural upwelling from the sea bed, yielded enormous numbers of small fish that, when dried and turned into meal, made a valuable protein supplement for farmers in fertile river valleys inland, such as the great settlement at Caral, about 120 miles north of present-day Lima. Caravans of llamas carried bags of fish meal high into the Andes, where the fish became a major economic prop of the Inca empire. Tens of thousands of anchovies were netted, dried, and stored before being traded on a near-industrial scale.

Fish were major historical players in many places. Dried fish fed merchant seamen crossing the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea to India; dried cod from northern Norway was the beef jerky that sustained Norse crews as they sailed to Iceland, Greenland, and North America.

Those who caught the fish that fed pre-modern civilizations were anonymous folk, who appeared with their catches in city markets, then vanished quietly back to their small villages in the hinterland. Perhaps it was the smell of fish that clung to them, or the simple baskets, nets, and spears they used to harvest their catches that kept them isolated from the townsfolk. Perhaps they preferred to be taken for granted. But their efforts helped create, feed, and link great civilizations for thousands of years.

Centuries ago, urban populations numbered in the thousands, but the demand for fish was insatiable. Today, the silent elephant in the fishing room is an exploding global population that considers ocean fish a staple. Deep-water trawls, diesel trawlers, electronic fish finders, and factory ships with deep freezes have turned the most ancient of our ways of obtaining food into an industrial behemoth. Even remote fisheries are being decimated.

Despite large-scale fish farming, humans face the specter of losing our most ancient practice of food-gathering—and thus leaving behind an ocean that is almost fishless.

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Alewives do not fit most contemporary definitions of delicious, but they do have a subtle fishy charisma that has captured the attention of dozens of my town’s 400-odd residents aged 10 to 90. Since 2007, they have spent thousands of hours monitoring and counting the fish. When the culvert became impassible in 2013, people even carried more than 700 fish across the road in buckets. In 2014, squads of volunteers, biologists, engineers, the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, and the Maine Natural Resource Conservation Program collaborated to build an alewife-, beaver-, and turtle-friendly culvert. This surprisingly simpatico relationship between citizens and fellow fish started in the 1600s, when dandelion greens and alewives made a fine spring feast. And—with vigilance and luck—it could continue to the 2400s and beyond.

An image of an alewife, also known as allis shad, from an Arents cigarette card from the U.K.

The future of a fish in general is not assured: Oceans are warming and acidifying, and fish catches have fallen dramatically worldwide since 1996. Between 1950 and 1995, we turned the seas into an industrial site, more than tripling the quantity of fish we pulled from the depths. The poster child for failing fish has been the Atlantic cod, whose numbers drifted downwards for centuries before collapsing in the 1980s—victims of overfishing and warming waters.

And so the alewife, with its deep cultural roots, may be a model fish of the future. They were once abundant in rivers and ponds from South Carolina to Labrador, Canada. But during the first wave of the Industrial Revolution, many of those rivers were dammed. In 1837, the Edwards Dam went across the Kennebec River at Augusta, bringing to a halt migrations of alewives and other herring, salmon, shad, and sturgeon. Pollution, including sewage, industrial waste, and runoff, got dumped in the rivers. Migrating fish numbers fell and fell and fell.

By 1999, the era of industrialization was over, the mills and their jobs were gone, and the Clean Water Act had tamed pollution. A group of environmental advocates successfully petitioned to get the dam blown up. Over the past 10 years, the population of herring in the Kennebec River alone has risen from just 50,000 to more than 3 million.

Dr. Karen Wilson, an associate research professor at the University of Southern Maine, has been working on alewife restoration and dam removal for years. “We won’t go back to the abundance of pre-colonial times,” she says. “But I think the future’s pretty bright.” The alewife has several advantages over other fish facing threats: It’s adaptable, willing to swim up another stream when a beaver has blocked its way. It is mainly fished for lobster bait these days, so there’s not a huge industry built around catching it. Instead of spawning in international waters, alewives do it in ponds tended by small towns. And finally, they are fun to watch as they wriggle their way upstream, which makes it easier to get those towns to support them.

I know about that firsthand. Spending time counting alewives is a highlight of my spring, and it’s allowed me to get to know my neighbors. But I wanted to find out just how alewives captured the attention of me and my townspeople.

I found Karen Robbins at the culvert, counting fish that had landed in the town’s trap, a few minutes after 8 this morning. It was a gorgeous day, warm, and the alewives in the pond were jumping around us. Robbins runs a construction company and in her spare time maintains spreadsheets about alewives.

Smoked alewives at an Alewife Festival in Maine in 2011.

Back in 2006, Robbins said, townspeople were trying to figure out what to do about high levels of phosphorus in the pond that lead to summer algae blooms. Most of the surrounding property is conserved woodland, so there wasn’t an obvious source of sewage or fertilizer to cut off. But then they heard of a study showing that juvenile alewives carried phosphorus out of inland ponds. Ding! The town decided to try to combine lowering phosphorus and helping out the few alewives who still made it to the pond.

And so they signed up volunteers to clean up the area around the culvert, set up a trap (to count the fish), and then organized a schedule of counting and releasing fish twice a day for more than a month. It’s a lot of work for such a small town, and after a few years it was clear the culvert needed replacing. People pitched in, with the town’s oldest resident working on the history of the fishery and an eighth grader designing a T-shirt.

While we talked, the fish continued to jump. “I love our fish,” said Robbins. “They were depleted almost to the last fish. Every memory of them was that they were better last year.” Since the project started in 2007 the number of fish returning to the pond has generally gone up, but some years are very high and others are lower. Nobody really knows what makes the alewife populations tick one way or another.

Robbins worries. “I hesitate to be hopeful. This requires vigilance. We need to support the ecosystem until it gets to the point where it can heal itself.” She points out that we’re not really “saving” the species, so much as we’re saving the genetic diversity of the particular stock that comes back here. In the event of a catastrophe elsewhere, the remaining alewives will have more resources to save themselves.

You might think that all this fish love is a new thing, a kind of post-industrial green tizzy—putting up a tree museum after we’ve paved over paradise. But its roots turn out to be much deeper. The written record of alewives in the nearby Nequasset pond, in Woolwich, Maine, goes back to when local Native Americans showed Europeans how to smoke the fish. Regulations about humans’ responsibility to assure safe passage for the fish to spawning ponds are in the 1623 Plymouth Colony Fish Law, says local historian Allison Hepler. She sent me a quote from the minutes of a 1792 Woolwich town meeting where citizens prevented overfishing by setting alewife harvest days and established fines for those who “transgrefsed.” “Any person who transgrefes in Cetching said fish shall pay a fine of ten shillings and forfeit their nets and fish, and ye fine be doubled for every offense.” Conservation wasn’t optional: The alewife was necessary for the community’s survival. Our town still has laws on the books guaranteeing widows two bushels of fish, as does Woolwich.

In this 2005 image, alewives are loaded onto a pickup in Nobleboro, Maine.

When the alewives arrive in the spring all of their predators perk up and a fantastic ecosystem-wide feeding frenzy begins. Bald eagles swoop above the river while the seals bounce up from below. Osprey hover and then dive dramatically, bearing the fish away in their feet, lined up aerodynamically with their flight path, like a fish-shaped basket hanging below a bird-shaped dirigible. Someday, maybe, the cod will come back to join the party offshore.

Inspired by the osprey and the widows—and the bad news about other fish—I’ve been trying to teach myself to enjoy alewives. Smoked, they have the salty slick of bait garnished with a dab of road tar, liquid smoke, and a frill of tiny bones. But I’ve persevered, because dependency fosters vigilance, and thus our mutual survival. I’ve scrambled them with potatoes and chard, pureed them with white beans and spices, boiled them in milk, baked them in water, and mixed them with tomatoes—in the hope that acid would break through the funk. I haven’t yet gotten the flavor profile to flip over into the tastier territories of scotch and anchovies.

But I still have hope.

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