Say, may I recommend two “Sea Shanty” movies? We really liked both of them.
Blow the Man Down – I really like this one – sort of a Hitchcock dark comedy / murder mystery. I need to rewatch, but it has great shanties that tie the scenes together.
Fisherman’s Friends – semi-true story of a group of Cornish fisherman in a very rural area that have a sea-shanty-based adventure.
Blow the Man Down
Blow the Man Down is a 2019 American black comedy thriller film, written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy. It stars Morgan Saylor, Sophie Lowe, Annette O’Toole, Marceline Hugot, Gayle Rankin, Will Brittain, Skipp Sudduth, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, June Squibb, and Margo Martindale.
It had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26, 2019. It was released on March 20, 2020, by Amazon Studios.
Fisherman’s Friends is a 2019 British comedy-drama film directed by Chris Foggin from a screenplay by Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard and Piers Ashworth.
The film was inspired by a true story about Fisherman’s Friends, a group of Cornish fishermen from Port Isaac who were signed by Universal Records and achieved a top 10 hit with their debut album of traditional sea shanties.
We greatly enjoyed the casting of the movie Blow the Man Down.
June Squibb
June Louise Squibb (born November 6, 1929) is an American actress. She began her career by making her Broadway debut in the musical Gypsy (1959). Her film debut was in the Woody Allen romantic comedy Alice (1990).
Wikipedia / Image By Frank Schulenburg – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Margo Martindale
Margo Martindale (born July 18, 1951) is an American character actress who has appeared on television, film, and stage. In 2011, she won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Critics’ Choice Television Award for her recurring role as Mags Bennett on Justified. She was nominated for an Emmy Award four times for her recurring role as Claudia on The Americans, winning it in 2015 and 2016.
Margo participated in golf, cheerleading and drama at school, and was crowned Football Sweetheart and Miss Jacksonville High School 1969.
Ms Martindale has been in many of our favorite movies and shows. She portrays the kind of woman you want in your life if, say, your pet hamster died and you need comfort, or you need to make a body disappear, no questions asked.
Semi-Sequitur: Cocaine Bear
We were delighted to see the reuniting of Margo Martindale and Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear. We plan to feature this docudrama at a WLBOTT corporate team-building retreat in the near future.
Demi-semi-sequitur: Jacksonville HS, Texas
Jacksonville High School Jacksonville High School is a 5A public high school located in Jacksonville, Texas, United States. It is part of the Jacksonville Independent School District located in north central Cherokee County. For the 2021–22 school year, the school was given a “B” by the Texas Education Agency.
Football Jacksonville and rival Nacogdoches played in the longest high-school football game in history, a 12-overtime affair in 2010 which resulted in Jacksonville winning 84-81. Only four years later the two would play a (short, by comparison) five-overtime game, with Jacksonville again winning, this time 85-79.
A sea shanty, shanty, chantey, or chanty (/ˈʃæntiː/) is a genre of traditional folk song that was once commonly sung as a work song to accompany rhythmical labor aboard large merchant sailing vessels. The term shanty most accurately refers to a specific style of work song belonging to this historical repertoire. However, in recent, popular usage, the scope of its definition is sometimes expanded to admit a wider range of repertoire and characteristics, or to refer to a “maritime work song” in general.
From Latin cantare via French chanter, the word shanty emerged in the mid-19th century in reference to an appreciably distinct genre of work song, developed especially on merchant vessels, that had come to prominence in the decades prior to the American Civil War. Shanty songs functioned to synchronize and thereby optimize labor, in what had then become larger vessels having smaller crews and operating on stricter schedules. The practice of singing shanties eventually became ubiquitous internationally and throughout the era of wind-driven packet and clipper ships.
Etymology The origin of the word “shanty” is unknown, though several inconclusive theories have been put forth. One of the earliest and most consistently offered derivations is from the French chanter, “to sing”.
Field-recording Shanty collection was seen as a facet of the early twentieth century folk revival. The Australian-born composer and folklorist Percy Grainger collected various shanties and recorded them on wax cylinders in the early 1900s.
Percy Aldridge Grainger (born George Percy Grainger; 8 July 1882 – 20 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who moved to the United States in 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century.
In 1902 he was presented by the socialite Lillith Lowrey to Queen Alexandra, who thereafter frequently attended his London recitals.
Lowrey, 20 years Grainger’s senior, traded patronage and contacts for sexual favours – he termed the relationship a “love-serve job”. She was the first woman with whom he had sex; he later wrote of this initial encounter that he had experienced “an overpowering landslide” of feeling, and that “I thought I was about to die. If I remember correctly, I only experienced fear of death. I don’t think that any joy entered into it”.
Grainger (centre), with Edvard Grieg (left of picture), Nina Grieg and Julius Röntgen, at “Troldhaugen”, July 1907
By Not recorded – Tapper, Thomas: The Child’s Book of Great Musicians: Grieg, Theo. Presser, Philadelphia 1921, PD-US
Semi-Sequitur: Visions of Rufus T. Firefly and Mrs. Teasdale
Margaret Dumont
Margaret Dumont (born Daisy Juliette Baker; October 20, 1882 – March 6, 1965) was an American stage and film actress. She is best remembered as the comic foil to the Marx Brothers in seven of their films; Groucho Marx called her “practically the fifth Marx brother.”
Early life Dumont was born Daisy Juliette Baker in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of William and Harriet Anna (née Harvey) Baker. Her mother was a music teacher and encouraged Daisy’s singing career from an early age.
In 1910, she married millionaire sugar heir and industrialist John Moller Jr and retired from stage work, although she had a small uncredited role as an aristocrat in a 1917 film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. The marriage was childless.
After her husband’s sudden death during the 1918 influenza pandemic, Dumont reluctantly returned to the Broadway stage, and soon gained a strong reputation in musical comedies. She never remarried.
With the Marx Brothers In 1925, theatrical producer Sam H. Harris recommended Dumont to the Marx Brothers and writer George S. Kaufman for the role of the stuffy rich widow Mrs. Potter in the Marxes Broadway production of The Cocoanuts. In their next Broadway show, Animal Crackers, which opened in October 1928, Dumont again was cast as foil and straight woman Mrs. Rittenhouse, another wealthy, high society widow. She appeared with the Marxes in the screen versions of both The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930).
In the Marx Brothers films, Dumont invariably portrayed rich widows whom Groucho would alternately insult and romance for their money:
Dumont was so important to the success of the Marx Brothers films, she was one of the few people Groucho mentioned in his short acceptance speech for an honorary Oscar in 1974. (The others were Harpo and Chico, their mother Minnie, and Groucho’s companion Erin Fleming.)
Dumont: …I’m afraid after we’re married awhile, a beautiful, young girl will come along and you’ll forget all about me. Groucho: Don’t be silly. I’ll write you twice a week.
