A Farewell Sea Shanty

Flaming Hydra's Tal Lavin sent all us Flaming Hydras an email expounding a vision of a week of MOBY DICK pieces. MOBY DICK WEEK! One of the possibilities mooted was a SEA SHANTY.

SEA SHANTY! How many times in a lifetime do you get ASKED to provide a SEA SHANTY? In my capacity as an unreconstructed Art Director (i.e., somebody who tells people to do stuff), I contacted my pal Dave Dudley, and said something to the effect of “Hey, remember that time we put on slickers and performed ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ in that coffeehouse in Baltimore? I still have the slickers, so you should write a SEA SHANTY and perform it for Flaming Hydra.” So Dave wrote an entire SEA SHANTY, brought in the heavenly-voiced Moira Horowitz to complete the crew, and now, let your fog be enkindled with this heavenly ray, a SEA SHANTY, to conclude the mysterious glories of MOBY DICK WEEK! — Joe MacLeod

One Line At a Time (The Moby Dick Song)

By David Dudley
Performed by Moira Horowitz and David Dudley

Be ye seafaring types, or bookish and frail
A-fishin’ for intel on huntin’ great whales
O lash yourself down to your best readin’ nook
For it’s time now to take on the world’s greatest book

One line at a time, lads
It’s gonna be fine lads
Hey nonny let’s learn about blubber and shit
Line after line
There’s plenty of time
And stuff in the middle you can probably skip

Gird yourselves, shipmates, a-goin’ to sea
There’s a crazy long chapter about cetology
We’ll hear about chowder and harpoons and cod
The whiteness of whales, the indifference of God

One line at a time, lads
It’s gonna be fine lads
Hey nonny let’s learn about blubber and shit
Line after line
There’s plenty of time
And stuff in the middle you can probably skip

Here comes Queequeg and Starbuck and Pip
Bunch of weird names in a big whaling ship
Ahab gets all of the quotable lines
But it’s 300 pages afore he says hi

One line at a time, lads
It’s gonna be fine lads
Hey nonny let’s learn about blubber and shit
Line after line
There’s plenty of time
And stuff in the middle you can probably skip

Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and lower the boats!
Turn off your cellphones and haul on the ropes
Wake up Tashtego and Daggoo and Flask
The eponymous creature has surfaced at last

One line at a time, lads
It’s gonna be fine lads
Hey nonny let’s learn about blubber and shit
Line after line
There’s plenty of time
And stuff in the middle you can probably skip

Now you’re flippin’ them pages with nary a pause
It’s like the last 45 minutes of Jaws
When Moby Dick rises to settle the score
Remember that it’s just a big metaphor

One line at a time, lads
It’s gonna be fine lads
Hey nonny let’s learn about blubber and shit
Line after line
There’s plenty of time
And stuff in the middle you can probably skip

Sing along in the Comments Section