Singing Sailors and Nautical Singers: A Lyrics-based Analysis of Sea-Folk Music

This study uses corpus-linguistic methods to investigate recurring semantic patterns and stylistic features of sea-folk song lyrics and poems set to music by Charlie Ipcar (1942–), the most well-known singer of traditional and contemporary songs of the sea. Sea-folk music is a centuries-old, well-established, international tradition, notable for its large number of anonymous and undated songs. Although corpus-based lyrical analysis has recently gained momentum within the field of linguistics, research has been primarily limited to pop and rock music, with little to no scholarly attention paid to folk music. In this study, 116 songs edited by Ipcar are analysed using the software Antconc and set against a reference corpus representative of sea-folk. The research questions are as follows: first, what are the distinguishing features of sea-folk music in comparison to other genres? Second, what are the foremost semantic areas appearing in Charlie Ipcar’s musical catalogue? Finally, how does Ipcar’s work particularly contribute to enriching the sea-folk tradition and imagery?