Opinion: A Musical Ransom Worth Paying

Almost no one was around to listen as the sounds came across Gardiner's Bay that September day in 1780, but a midshipman aboard the British warship Royal Oak was singing "Tom Bowling," a tribute to a dead sea captain that was a favorite with sailors of the time.

Now, 217 years later, it is possible to recapture a trace of that historical moment and 38 others, many of which took place on the East End, thanks to an enjoyable pair of CDs by an accomplished folk musician named Stan Ransom.

Mr. Ransom (apparently no kin save in affection for things nautical to the British man of letters who wrote the classic "Swallows and Amazons" books for children, Arthur Ransome) also is a folklorist.

Wainscott Dumplings

During a long career as a librarian, he used his research skills to ransack archives for songs that deal with Long Island or were part of Long Island life. He surely should be invited to give a concert during East Hampton's forthcoming 350th anniversary celebration.

For instance, he unearthed an 1832 poem, possibly a nursery rhyme, about a Wainscott Dumpling (the local name for a native of that hamlet, akin to Bonacker for an East Hamptoner) who "caught a whale/ Stuck an iron in his tail." He found a plaintive ballad about Captain Kidd, best known in these parts for burying treasure on Gardiner's Island, though Mr. Ransom says he dug it up again after nine days.

Nearly Home, But

Mr. Ransom sets to his own, authentic-sounding music a poem published in the American Mercury in 1925 in which George Sterling of Sag Harbor displays puritanical pride in his whaling captain grandfather, a stickler for discipline.

When his ship, Thomas Dickinson, was nearly home after two years at sea ("Block Island lay to starboard, Montauk lay to port"), the sailor "Billy Palmer, an Amagansett boy," refused to swab the decks and threw the swabs overboard. The captain, a "kind" man but "tougher than a spar," promptly turned the ship around and made the crew scrub the decks for three days in punishment.

Sings the narrator: "And when the anchor rattled down in harbor water green, Their blessed hearts were clean and wise, and the deck uncommon clean!"

Mr. Ransom, now 79, sings in a resonant, flexible bass that saw service in the Yale Glee Club. Even better, he accompanies himself with taste and skill not only on familiar folk instruments like the guitar and banjo but on two cheerfully ethereal hammered dulcimers, one of which, he proudly says in his liner notes, was made by members of his musical family in the 1850s.

Though born in Connecticut, for 20 years in the 1960s and '70s he lived on Long Island as director of the Huntington Public Library and was part of the era's folk music revival. (He recalls "times in our Huntington home when more than 70 folk musicians were crammed in every corner of every room, playing and singing.")

It was then he began collecting and performing local materials. For the East End, he acknowledges help from Dorothy King of the East Hampton Library's Long Island Collection and Averill Geus, director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum.

Mohican Text

Haunting melodies are a special discovery in his disks, which are titled "My Long Island Home," after a song composed in 1928, and "I Love Long Island," after a "theme song" he wrote for the Island that is one of the weaker pieces in the collection but that must be great fun as an audience sing-along.

One of my favorites is "Waked by the Gospel's Powerful Sound," with a tune from a book called "New and Beautiful Collection of Select Hymns and Spiritual Songs." The text, Mr. Ransom explains, was written about 1800 by a "Mohican Indian from Connecticut, Samson Occum."

The liner notes tell a fascinating tale:

Samson Occum

Occum was "educated by Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1759, and preached among the Native Americans of eastern Long Island. He was sent to England to preach and was instrumental in raising œ10,000 to assist in the founding of Dartmouth College, Wheelock's Indian School."

Quaint fun lurks in parlor songs from the Island's Victorian era like "Lilly Dale" and East Hampton's own unofficial anthem, "Home, Sweet Home" (in a slightly unfamiliar tune).

A former East Hampton resident, Christian Johnson, wrote the music for "Ballad of Pudding Hill," about one of the village's local landmarks, and adopted a traditional tune to "Acres of Clams," both of which are recorded by Mr. Ransom on "My Long Island Home."

Mild antidotes to the East End's sense of uniqueness may be taken in songs about whale ships out of Cold Spring Harbor, the retreat of British soldiers from Hempstead Harbor (later renamed Roslyn in commemoration of the tune the soldiers played), and even, in a song written in 1961, about fair maidens who lived in Brooklyn.

Familiar Sentiment

Mr. Ransom's research turned up only songs from the era B.S.C. (Before Shopping Centers). But the sentiment that has driven development (and undermined the awareness of historic traditions that these recordings help reawaken) since well before Levittown was in full bloom in the 1926 song "My Own Long Island."

Stan Ransom's lively and useful collection makes clear that then as now the Island was a place of which someone en route could say: "I'll close the city's gates behind me/ And bid farewell to Old Broadway."

(Mr. Ramson sells his recordings, including other compilations of songs about the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain, for $15 for CDs [$10 for cassettes] plus $1.50 for mailing and 7 percent state sales tax, from 30 Broad Street, Plattsburgh, N.Y. 12901. He'll probably handle holiday orders by phone as well.)

Christopher T. Cory, who knows folk music from way back, is university public relations director for Long Island University.