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Obras de Stuart M. Frank

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You think "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" is bad? You ain't heard nothin' yet.

The problem for someone who wants to sing pirate songs is that there aren't any. Pirates were mostly rebels, pirates were mostly illiterate, and pirates mostly ended up dead. If they had special songs, they couldn't write them down themselves, and no one else was in position to collect them. So anything billed as a "pirate song" is either a song about rather than by pirates -- or it's a fake.

Because this book came from Loomis House Press, publisher of very high-end scholarly works (including my own), I assumed it would be a collection of folk songs about pirates. And, yes, there are a few of those, like those old chestnuts "Henry Martin," "Captain Ward," "High Barbary," and "Captain Kidd." There are some traditional but lesser-known items such as "Bold Manaan the Pirate" and "Liverpool Play" (which, if you know it at all, will probably be from the Copper Family's "Warlike Seamen" version).

The problem is, there are eighty-four songs here, and only about two dozen of them are traditional. The rest are the fakes -- the pieces that someone wrote, pretending they came from pirates. A few are good, most are dreadful, and none of them have any historic significance at all. Their only functional purpose is to pad out a thin book; no one will want to sing them -- after the first dozen or so, I didn't even want to read any more. The pickings are so slim, I'm amazed author Frank didn't start ringing in stuff from "The Pirates of Penzance."

To give credit where it is due, the songs are mostly well-researched -- for the songs which do appear in other collections, Frank is always the most complete source of background information. It can be a good reference for songs you find in other books and want to know more about. Whether that justifies buying all the bloat is something the reader will have to decide.

It should be noted that this is not a second book of songs to accompany Frank's earlier Book of Pirate Songs. All the material in the Book of Pirate Songs is here, with some new pieces added and some additional information supplied (including, in a few cases, tunes). The New Book is definitely a better book than its predecessor. But all the added material is non-traditional. If you want the traditional songs, the original book will give you all you need.
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waltzmn | Sep 10, 2017 |

Estatísticas

Obras
16
Membros
53
Popularidade
#303,173
Avaliação
3.0
Resenhas
1
ISBNs
15

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