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Joe Dolce
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In the Op Shop With Percy Grainger

For me, Shallow Brown is one of the most stunningly original of Grainger's folk-song settings. Gavin Bryars

Shallow Brown is my favourite Percy Grainger arrangement for a traditional folksong.

I have just spent the past week transcribing it for solo guitar and voice. A few years ago, I found an original full copy of this score in an op shop for three dollars. My old music teacher, Dr Lou Gottlieb, PhD Musicology, once told me all the greatest works of art are found either in museums or second-hand shops.

Shaller Brown you’re goin’ ter leave me,
Shaller Shaller Brown

Shaller Brown don’t ne’er deceive me,
Shaller Shaller Brown

You’re goin’ away accrost the ocean
Shaller Shaller Brown

You’ll ever be my heart’s devotion
Shaller Shaller Brown

For your return my heart is burning
Shaller Shaller Brown

Shaller Brown you’re goin’ ter leave me,
Shaller Shaller Brown

Shaller Brown don’t ne’er deceive me,
Shaller Shaller Brown

Grainger’s score has some pretty insane instructions for the instrumentation:

1 gut stringed guitar re-strung with 6 B strings all tuned to B-flat.
1 gut stringed guitar re-strung with 6 G strings all tuned to F.
1 gut stringed guitar re-strung with 6 D strings all tuned to D.
1 gut stringed guitar re-strung with 6 A strings all tuned to low F.

Percy advises the same for ukuleles. In other words, take all your strings off your instrument and put six of the exact SAME string back on it.

Wha??? The idea here is to simulate the sound of the ocean by just strumming with felt picks across identical strings, which should always be fingered in unison! Certainly saves you the bother of actually having to learn to play these instruments - although it might be simpler just to hold the concert at a lighthouse in the middle of Hurricane Luigi! But I'll be damned if I'm going to re-string my guitar this way just because Percy doesn’t want to learn to play guitar or simply for an effect. Life is too short.

I can create a credible stormy ocean effect in an ordinary tuning using electric guitar distorted chord tremolo combined with electric blues harmonica with vibrato. Of course, the electric guitar hadn’t been invented in Percy’s day but that never stopped him before. Why didn’t he invent that while he was inventing things? I also hear a wild Jimi Hendrix-style arrangement of this song of which I'm sure Percy and Jimi would have both approved. Hendrix would also have killed for a pair of Grainger’s homemade terry-towel trousers. Very 60s psychedelic. I have a pair but I never wear them on account of the nurses laughing at me at the Senior Citizen’s Centre.

Percy Grainger also did not approve of using the customary Italian, German or French dynamic markings such as forte, pianissimo or dolce. (And I take that last one personally.) Stop aping the Europeans! he declaimed. We need our own Australian terms! he argued. And then he stubbornly wrote out his instructions in good ol’ Aryan Grainger-lish. Markings like:

Slowish… intense… wayward in time…
piercingly… threateningly… lingeringly…
slightly faster than first speed…
richly… warmer… slow off... long… remain… to the fore…
gradually slow off and fade right away…
as if from afar…

Sounds a bit affected to me. If I truly had wanted an Australian Boy’s Own dynamic marking system, I would have gone for something more like this:

She’ll Be Right: (for difficult sections)
They Must Be Dreamin’: (for very difficult sections)
Bog in: to attack the part with enthusiasm
Chuck a Sickie: don’t play here
Chuck a U-e: da capo, turn around or back to the beginning
Clucky: play with sensitivity
Mad as a Cut Snake: play furiously
Earbashing: play very loud
Grin Like a Shot Fox: play with abandon
Get the Pink Slip: stop
Not the Full Quid: only half the instruments play here
Veg Out: slower
Away with the Pixies: improvise.
Pull ya head in: play quieter
Don't get your knickers in a knot: not too fast
Throw-down: play very fast
Fair crack of the whip: allegro or faster
Flat chat or flat out: fff or very loud
Pat Malone: solo

Grainger's adaption of Shallow Brown is still the finest setting of a folk song for mixed instruments and voices I have ever heard. In the liner notes to the score, he notes that John Perring, of Dartmouth England, the deep-sea sailor he learned the song from in 1908, did not know what the Shallow Brown in the title meant - assuming that perhaps it signified shallow in his heart.

I find it amazing that these old sea salts, and even Grainger himself, would be singing a song like this for decades without understanding the key image. Of course, it doesn't really matter: the underlying meaning of Shallow Brown concerns a someone bidding farewell to their departing lover who is voyaging across the sea - an emotion that anyone can clearly understand.

Odd, though, that mostly male sailors used to sing this, as it comes from the point of view of a woman! I guess it got lonely out there chasing Moby Dick. Seriously, though, this was a common custom in folksong, e.g. House of the Rising Sun, My Johnnie Was a Shoemaker, My Bonnie Boy, Maids When You’re Young, Don’t Come The Cowboy With Me Sonny Jim, and Carrickfergus are all sung by men, from a woman’s perspective.
I've uncovered the most likely meaning of the title by pursuing the background of the lyric further. These shanty tunes travelled trade routes and Shallow Brown originated as a pumping and halyard shanty in the West Indies - sometimes called Challo Brown.

There are also separate and completely different lyric and melodic versions than the one Grainger set such as:

Fare thee well, my Juliana,
Shallow, oh Shallow Brown,
Fare thee well, my Juliana,
Shallow Brown, Shallow Brown

and

Challo Brown's a bright mulatter,
Challo, oh Challo Brown,
and she hails from Cincinatter!
Challo, oh Challo Brown.

Challo is the West Indian word denoting half-caste. Shallow brown, or high yellow (often pronounced, high yalla or high yaller), was a lighter-skinned Negro person. Or, as some said, mostly white. I wonder of some of these old often racist sea-salts would have continued to sing-along had they known it was about someone pining for their half-caste lover?

In Australia, up to the forties, white Australians ranked Indigenous people into a kind of caste system. A full-blood was someone who had no white blood, a half-caste was one with a white parent, a quarter-caste was a person with an Aboriginal grandparent and an octoroon was someone whose great-grandparent was an Aboriginal.

In the US South, there was a litany of almost forensic racist terms to identify the various and precise amounts of African blood present in mixed-marriage offspring. The most common were:

Griffe - Offspring of a white and a black. Used especially in Louisiana. Mulatto - a person who is one-half Negro, one-half white. The child of one white parent and one Negro parent. From the Spanish and Portuguese word mulato meaning young mule. The mule is of course one-half horse and one half donkey a hybrid. (In Brazil the term Cafuzo is used to describe a half-Indian half-Negro person.)

Marabou - a person having five-eighths Negro blood; the offspring of a mulatto and a griffe. Usage found in Louisiana.

Melungeon - a person of mixed racial heritage. Common usage in East Tennessee. Tri-racial.

Quadroon or Quarteron - a person who is one-quarter Negro, three-quarters white. The child of one white parent and a mulatto. From the Latin quartus; Spanish cuarto meaning fourth.

Octoroon or Mustee - a person who is one-eighth Negro, seven-eighths white. The child of one white parent and a quadroon. From the Latin word octo meaning eight.

Sacatra - an offspring of a griffe and a Negress, heard in Louisiana.

Zambo - a person who is three-quarters Negro, one-quarter white. The child of a mulatto and a Negro; also, the child of an Indian and a Negro.

(Ed Note: as well as the Quadroon and the Octoroon, there should have also been the Looneytoon: that's one-fifth George W Bush and four-fifths Karl Childers from Slingblade – issue of the inbreed hillbilly crackers who spent their time thinking up these offensive and ridiculous terms.)

Percy Grainger had the utmost respect for the folksong once saying that there was no musical notation yet invented that could capture the subtlety of what happens when a folksinger sings.

Compare this with what Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Corigliano said recently when he tried to set some of Bob Dylan’s well-known lyrics to his own original musical compositions. Corigliano claimed to have never heard the Dylan classics in their time and was approaching the lyrics with a blank slate. (I find that hard to believe of any serious musician but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.) When he finished his own settings and finally had a listen to Dylan’s originals, including Hey Mr Tambourine Man, he commented:  “you have the same eight bars repeated like 25 times. When I first heard it, I was dumbfounded.” eh duh.

Corigliano was obviously asleep during Percy Grainger 101 (ie. "... no musical notation yet invented that [can] capture the subtlety of what happens when a folksinger sings....")

Composer Gavin Bryars, who also performed Shallow Brown, understood the difficult bridge that Grainger was trying to create between the folksong and serious music:

“In addition to these exquisite harmonic nuances he plays wonderful games with shifting musical time values. There are seldom more than two consecutive bars with the same time signature and the same words - the choral response "Shaller, Shaller Brown" - uses a bewildering variety of rhythms but which always sound to the listener perfectly natural. The dynamics too are extremely precise and very extreme: the first bar, for example, has a single chord, played tremolando (or rather "woggled") which has a crescendo and diminuendo from ppp to fff and back to pp. Throughout the music seldom stays on one dynamic plane, playing with the natural rise and fall associated with the marine context. As Grainger says in his short programme note he aimed "to convey a suggestion of wafted, wind-borne, surging sounds heard at sea".

Let’s finish with some of Grainger’s own passionate comments on his distinctive style of piano playing which form a ‘note to piano teachers and students’ on the third page of the sheet music for Country Gardens, which I also found in another op shop for about five dollars and, to my knowledge, has never been published elsewhere:

“The passages marked to be played ‘with stiff fingers, stiff hand, stiff wrist’ are intended to develop finger resistance and to serve as a fore-study for ‘stiff’ octave playing – in which not only the fingers, hand and wrist, but also the whole arm and other parts of the body, are gripped in an almost cramp-like tenseness. This habit of highly energized attack forms, in my opinion, the basis of the greater part of modern piano technic. It is to be hoped that an early familiarity, on the part of the student, with such ‘stiff’ playing will help to lay the bogie ‘relaxation’ – which, in most cases, is nothing but an absurd superstition, a mere catch-word, an invitation to laziness. Since bodily laziness is at the root of most pianistic short-comings (as it likewise is the origin of most ill-health and ill-deeds in other fields) the student should be led to practice in the most mercilessly energetic, taxing and exhausting way possible – instead of being advised to ‘spare’ himself, as I ‘relaxation’. If the attack is sufficiently energized (stiff, tense, spasmodic) the relaxation (between attacks) will look after itself. You do not have to tell a man to sleep who has just walked 65 miles without stopping. Let us remember Nietzsche’s wise words: ‘Only utmost hardness (that is: hardihood, stoicism, unflinchingness) is beautiful.’” Percy Aldridge Grainger, July 16-17, 1930.