| Sumario: | 'Shenandoah' (Roud 324) is counted among the most recognizably 'American' traditional songs. Most people are not aware, however, that 'Shenandoah' once belonged primarily to the repertoire of the nineteenth-century shipboard work songs called chanties. The impressionable sound of the forms in which it has since been performed, unwittingly, by art and folk revival concert musicians over the last century has colluded with the song's popular Americana image against its accurate historical perception. Rather than a case of a folk song that transformed through a gradated chain of aural transmission, discrepancies between its prior and current forms may be attributed to infelicities of notators and a concurrent disconnect between work singers, publishers, and concert performers. In particular, twentieth-century folklorists and musicologists, experiencing the song outside of its accompanying context of shipboard performance, were challenged to discern its functional rhythm as a song to which to work. Thus, chief among the sonic issues bearing on modern audiences' lack of recognition of this song as a chanty, a work song, are those related to the metre and timing of its melody. This essay argues that the only effective way to recover the chanty identity of 'Shenandoah' is to envision its performance in the functional manner of that genre. To that end, I synthesize historiography (musicology), formal analysis (music theory), and insights gleaned from experiential fieldwork (ethnomusicology) to recover the song's virtually lost, working rhythm. My analysis utilizes data from over sixty documents (print, manuscript, and audio) of the melody of 'Shenandoah' and practical knowledge of shipboard labour methods.
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