Description of Halina Stefanowska – Rozspiewane Morze (1975)
Halina Stefanowska – Rozspiewane Morza (1975), is one of three Polish-language books about sea shanties (another two: Along with the book “Szanty I Szantymeni” – Marek Szurawski and “Songs from under the sails” – Jerzy Wadowski). However, sea shanties are not the main topic of this book. Also, I discovered that only the first 66 pages contain shanties with their descriptions.
As mentioned previously the first chapter “Boys, Ahoj”, contains a set of sea shanties, is very interesting, and has a lot of important information about shanties. It is worth mentioning, that the shanties in this chapter are also translated into Polish.
I also found that this book is big, it contains almost 400 pages. Most of the time, the book keeps a patriotic tone, starting with the description of the maritime school in Tczew, through the often dramatic circumstances of the creation of certain sea songs (written during World War II and the post-war period). I Halina Stefanowska’s songs also have chords for guitar. To finish my review, I can confirm, that this book is a really great source of knowledge about sea shanties and Polish sea songs.
Do you want to be more involved?
You can find excellent records of sea shanties here. If you want to discuss this book; or share your opinion you can do it in my Facebook forum here, or below post in the comment section.
Related to Rozspiewane Morze (1975)
Additional Stan Hugill’s books Sailortown (1967), Sea Shanties (1977), Shanties and Sailor’ Songs (1969).