An Interview with William Pint
February, 1999, Albuquerque Folk Alliance
Here we are in Albuquerque I think this is the first time I've really had to learn how to spell Albuquerque just from preparation to come here. I've heard so many Albuquerque jokes...I'm talking to... Who the heck are you? William Pint of William Pint and Felicia Dale. I had met you a long time ago...in Houston, you probably don't remember me, because I was one of zillions of people in the audience. Aw, it was a crowd, yeh. That was a great gig, I do remember that. You remember that? Well, it was nice...well, we've only played in Texas..very few times, that stands out, that was a nice place, I walked into the place and there was Martin Carthy on the PA system, I thought, this is something different, you walk into a bar in Texas and Martin Carthy's on the sound system, we've come to the right place. Well, I think at that point they were doing a lot of really interesting Celtic stuff and I think even next month they have a big March line up of Celtic... I think I've seen some posters around for that... What's that day they have in Ireland...St Patricks Day? Yeh, actually I think it's a bigger day here in the United States than it is in Ireland. Now where are you from originally? Originally, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Oh, you're not from the Northwest then? Well, have been for about the last 25 years. And how did you...maybe you should say a little bit about what you do. My partner and I...Felicia and I play music, traditional music mostly, often involving the theme of the sea, so that would range from traditional work songs from the square rigger days up to contemporary songs with the sea as a theme and actually also quite a bit of poetry on that theme that we've actually set to music or have gotten from other people who have also set these theme to music. I think you had one about Halloween... Oh yeh, we have a couple like that...ghostly sailors returning from the dead, or not leaving their ship. There's all sorts of fun things. And you play guitar... Guitar, mandolin, mandola, any of those...any of that family of double course things, the mandolin family. And Felicia plays hurdy gurdy... She plays hurdy gurdy, yeh. Which always draws a much bigger crowd, I get left out, no one comes up and says "What's that instrument you're playing?" "Well, this is a guitar! You strike the strings with the plectrum..." No everyone's gathered around the hurdy gurdy to see how that works and that is...it's a pretty unusual instrument with... So how did she end up playing hurdy gurdy? Believe it or not, there are a number of people in the Seattle area who play hurdy gurdy and we had heard little bits of it in our travels as well, actually there was one group that we saw on a tour once and it was just such an unusual sound and it just really changed the sound of the group and Felicia said "That's it I just gotta get one of these." so she went...had one made for her and has been playing it ever since. She didn't start out playing it then. No, she borrowed one from one of our friends who had one and sort of experimented on it a little bit and ordered one and the next thing we knew we were traveling and she was being billed as a hurdy gurdy player so its sort of jump in there and start swimming. Now if you were out on one of these boats would you have instruments with you? Actually a lot of these instruments went to sea. A lot of them...you mostly hear of things like concertinas or little accordions and things like that but actually by looking around at old photographs we've a lot of things including guitar, even hammered dulcimer, which we saw with the crew of a ship. They had these little things they called foufou bands they would.. FouFou bands. "Fou fou bands was the technical term." and they took instruments that they could make or for people who didn't have instruments with them they'd make kind of like the comb and tissue paper, kazoos were the big things, but pots and pans, anything that would make a noise these guys would use and they'd make little bands on board the ship. I cant say I've ever seen a hurdy gurdy on one of these photos, but actually we make jokes about these, it qualifies as one of these instruments because if you threw it overboard it would float because it sort of looks like a boat. I've seen your artwork on the cover. Well, that's it, on a couple of albums we've turned the hurdy gurdy into a sailing ship. That's pretty weird. You'd be amazed how many people come up and say that they had those albums for years before they noticed there was something strange about the covers. Now when you're doing a song, you're using instruments that are different from what would be out on those ships. Not only are we using instruments that are different but we're really approaching the music in a real different way. There are those people that do that kind of traditional music in a very traditional manner, maybe Lou Killen would be one of those people who would qualify either by maybe singing unaccompanied or a just with a concertina and singing in a very traditional manner. We kind of approach that music...we use it as a departure point and we like to update the sound of it, we like to put in our own arrangements and give it our own spin, so it ends up like being a more contemporary sound, certainly than would be practiced on board a ship. But we're modern people and we have influences from everything from rocknroll to whatever, and it all plays some kind of a part in the way the music sounds when it is finished. Yeh, I guess the rock influences sneak into almost everything. Well, you know. For us, I think that traditional music from the 19th century work songs especially the sea chanteys, fits perfectly with a rocknroll feel, because they have a repetition , a steady beat, you know, these things were used for the rhythm which is a tool to do work on board ship, right? So everybody had to pull of push at the same time. So the rhythm is very very steady, just like rocknroll music. The chorus...there's a chorus...the chorus is very repetitious, very easy to remember, very catchy tunes, that a crew who may never have heard one of these songs before could join in with almost immediately because that was necessary for getting the work done, so it has a lot of elements that just fit very nicely into more contemporary music. Now you must have done a lot of research on this... Yes, at one point...there are a couple of books for anyone who's really interested in this stuff. There was a fellow named Sam Hugel who died just a few years ago who was the last remaining chantey man, who actually had worked aboard ships as a young man in the 20s, just around the end of the days of sail and he had learned all sorts of things from the old timers and he collected them all and wrote them down in these books and his books are considered the Bible of traditional cause he has all sorts of variations, he's got hundreds of them. But we have also ended up in places, because of the nature of what we play we play in maritime museums, we've done festivals at Mystic Seaport, Ct., and some of these places, so you kind of run into material, research material, some friends of ours run a whaling museums, they have access to the journals of these old timers. I was thinking about how some of those old songs are pretty racy. Yes some of them are. Was there a time they wouldn't put some of those on recordings as they were sung originally? Yes, actually, even Stan Hugel's books, a lot of them he even freely admits he's changed them and cleaned them up for publication purposes. But oftentimes you can read between the lines and read what it was supposed to be. But its interesting, some of those songs were like that, very raw, you've got a crew of men aboard ships for months and months at a time, and they sing about all sorts of topics. At one point, in the history of shipping the captains would actually take their wives and children on board with them, because you know they got tired of being around all these yahoos in the focsle, and suddenly there was a refined presence aboard ships and the songs changed so that they just as racy, but disguised. Using sailor terminology just filled with double meanings. So that they could be singing a song that was incredibly racy and downright rude right next to the captain's wives and daughters and they would not know, because they thought they were singing about some part of the ship...the ship became the metaphor for all sorts of things. Actually there's a lot of those kind of songs. I think when I first went on radio there was one you did...pump shanty...that I thought there might be a metaphor in there and was wondering if I should play that on the radio. Ah...yeh. That's a composed song but that's very much in the tradition. It fits right in there because you're talking about pumping the ship and anything else you want to read into it its up to you. But that's one reason we did that song, because it's such a...true to the traditional form. To change the subject...the last album, you did winter...was it Winters Crossing? When I See Winter... Wrong one! That's not all sea chanteys though. No, when we come home to Seattle, for us its been about the last 10 years, we've been joining in with another group called the Magical Strings...actually they're also here at the Folk Alliance, it's a couple who play harp and hammered dulcimer, Pam and Philip Boulding and they have 5 kids that all play music and for the last 20 years they've been doing Yuletide Concerts, and people have been coming and watching the kids grow up on stage over the last 20 years and we've been joining in with them, with songs because they don't sing so over the years we've gathered up these little pieces that we've done for these concerts and finally we said well, we'll put out a CD with those now that we've got enough of them, so that's where that came from. But yeh, the only song the only album we have that doesn't have a nautical theme, with the exception of "We Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In" which we sort of turned into a chantey. I paused this for a section...I was asking if anything interesting was happening in your future. Yes, we're going to be doing a little more traveling. We do a fair amount of touring in England and in Holland, but this year we've been invited to a couple of festivals...believe it or not, sea chantey festivals In Estonia and in Poland, so this will be a whole new trip for us. So we're going up there the end of July to Tallinn and also a festival in Poland as well. Yeh, they must have sea chanteys over there as well. Poland, amazingly enough, sea chanteys are amazingly popular and we've been reading about these festivals for years where they have five or six thousand people all chanting the names. Well, Stan Hugel who I mentioned before he dies would go over there as a special guest and he said it was like a rock concert, these people crammed into these big venues, five thousand people just chanting his name and singing along on all the choruses. If you go over to Estonia or Poland and you listen to the sea chanteys, is there anything common? Yeh, I think because of the international nature in those days, many times the same song would come around in different versions, they'd be translated directly or just the melodies would be used for a different topic with a completely different set of lyrics but in a different language so you do recognize things quite a bit and there's the feel of everyone singing along with the chorus lines and the work that's involved in there. But now we've heard a number of these recordings and quite a few of these songs have been translated into Polish or Estonian. M.m... Yeh, quite a kick to hear it.