Mary can be heard in a story with Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition from 16 January 2021, talking about the recent surge of interest in sea shanties on TikTok. The transcript is too cool not to quote here:
Scott Simon: “Mary Malloy is also a folk singer. How could she not be with so fine a name? And yes, she sings sea songs. Here be Mary.”
Mary has been performing songs and tunes of American and Anglo-Irish sailors since the great revival of the songs in the late 1970s. First with the band Morrigan in Seattle, and later with her husband Stuart Frank, she has made numerous recordings on a variety of media that no long exist, including LPs.
Two of the Folkways albums on which Morrigan appears are now available online; click on the covers below for the links. “Songs of the American Whalerman” with Stuart is still only available on a cassette, and “Pirate Songs!” (it’s rated Aaaargh!) is on a CD, but sold out long ago and is hard to find. (There was a third Folkways album, “Leave Her Johnnie, Leave Her: The Stories and Shanties of Hjalmar Rutzebeck,” but it is too embarrassing to be acknowledged here.)
This band, with my much-loved mates William Pint and Marc Bridgham, had a regular gig at Doc Maynard’s in Seattle for several years, and had an avid audience of real sailors in the crew of the USCG Icebreaker Polar Sea, which was berthed nearby on the Seattle waterfront.
This was recorded at the first San Francisco Sea Music Festival in 1979. I met my husband Stuart Frank there, who was then the chanteyman at Mystic Seaport. Stan Hugill was there as well. He climbed aloft on the C.A. Thayer and his shoe fell off and hit me on the head while I was standing innocently on the deck below. He made an impact on a lot of singers, but few felt it as much as I did.