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I challenge anyone not to hear it and weep, freighted as it is with our troubled, shared history, between human and whale. When making a BBC Arena film on the story behind Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, we recorded Collins singing the song ( hear it on the BBC Arena website).
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The power of her transcendent voice, underlain with the sound of a singing humpback whale, caught an emotional moment in time – and still does. That year, the folk singer and activist Judy Collins brought these two disciplines together – human and whale folk art, if you will – in her yearning recording of the traditional Scottish whaling song, Farewell to Tarwathie. If anything could be said to have saved the whale, in an era of burgeoning awareness, it was that sound. Dr Roger Payne released his recordings as the chart-busting Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970. And not only a voice, but a song, a beautiful, fluting, gurgling threnody for its own fate. An animal that had been hitherto regarded as dumb – and therefore unable to protest its abuse – suddenly had a voice. Ironically, this resurgence came at the same time that we discovered whales themselves could sing.
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Hunters flense a baleine whale at the great whaling station, Christiania (Oslo). Lloyd had worked on whaling ships in the southern ocean, an experience that led him to collect and record whaling songs, many with Ewan MacColl, on albums such as 1956’s The Singing Sailor and Leviathan! a decade later. But they were rediscovered in the mid-20th century as part of the resurgent folk tradition, championed by the celebrated British ethnomusicologist AL Lloyd (1908-82). Songs such as The Bonny Ship the Diamond and The Weary Whaling Grounds may well have vanished with their singers, and a now (generally) dead industry. They were singalong songs, measured to the rhythm of working men, exhorting them to climb rigging, haul ropes, scrub decks, chase whales. Whaling songs developed from the tradition of sea shanties. The first came in the shape of scrimshaw, the intricately carved whale bones and teeth (and popularised in the 20th century by the collection of John F Kennedy, who was actually interred with a sperm-whale tooth in his coffin). Indeed, it was boredom that resulted in some of the most extraordinary folk art of the 18th and 19th centuries, created in the long intervals between intense action and visceral butchery. No: the worst part for many men on those voyages – which could last as long as five years before they caught sight of home again – was the sheer tedium. Or that you then spent days cleaning up only to be faced with the same noisome, bloody scene all over again. Or because, if successful, you then had to deconstruct the leviathan on deck, unpeeling its blubber like a gigantic orange, and rendering it down to oil in stinking ovens known as try pots. Not just because you spent your working days in extreme danger in pursuit of the world’s biggest predator, the sperm whale, at risk of being flipped over and into the ocean by the enraged creature’s tail. The dreary business of whaling was one of the worst jobs at sea. Oh the whale is free, of the boundless seaĪnd he scatters the spray in his boisterous play,