| Summary: | This article investigates the chantey "Serafina" from the unpublished collection of erotic folklore collector Gershon Legman. The song is a part of the unexpurgated repertoire of famed chantey singer and collector Stan Hugill who provided the song to Legman for a collection of erotic songs that he intended to publish. Specifically, this article discusses the potential origin and importance of the song—which is a representation of sailing work songs of the sea—and addresses the ways in which song content reproduces perceptions of and anxieties around prostitutes, sailors, and venereal disease. The main character, a singing old salt, regales audiences with his experiences of the notorious Serafina, but cautions all who encounter her that they might leave their engagement with a dose of both syphilis and gonorrhea. Throughout, intersections of commerce, circularity, and virality are of chief focus as well as the leaky quality of both the figure of the prostitute and the diseases she was imagined carrying. The singer emerges as a living venereal pustule who erupts onto the scene of pleasure, capturing the realities that attended the early modern sailing man and his dalliances in port.
|
|---|