Sailor Song

This epic tale of the north is a vibrant moral fable for our time. Set in the near future in the fishing village of Kuinak, Alaska, a remnant outpost of the American frontier not yet completely overcome by environmental havoc and mad-dog development, Sailor Song is a wild, rollicking novel, a dark and cosmic romp. The town and its denizens--colorful refugees from the Lower Forty-Eight and DEAPs (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples)--are seduced and besieged by a Hollywood crew, come to film the classic children's book The Sea Lion. The ensuing turf war escalates into a struggle for the soul of the town as the novel spins and swirls toward a harrowing climax. Writing with a spectacular range of language and style, Kesey has given us a unique and powerful novel about America.

Passed down in the oral tradition and sung as working songs, sea shanties tell the compelling human stories of life on the water: hard labor, battling the elements, pining for distant loves and far-away homes. The music?s rhythms are designed to galvanize the group effort of heaving, pushing, and pulling to weigh anchor, wind rope around a capstan, or set sail. Acclaimed shanty devotee Gerry Smyth presents the background to each shanty alongside musical notation. The lyrics are elaborated upon with explanations of terminology, context including historical facts and accounts of life at sea, and the characters, both fictional and nonfictional, that appear in the songs from the great age of sail to the last days of square-rig.

A mother sings her child a song that describes how a sailor makes his way home from the sea to his family.

THE STORY: SAILOR'S SONG is an extravagant romantic seaside story decorated with dance. In the tradition of Gene Kelly and Eugene O'Neill, who should have worked together but never did, this stylistically daring love story gives us a cynical man an

This work examines folk-songs in various parts of world, including American sea-songs, folk-songs of the American Civil War, English and Scottish ballads and other subjects.