William Main Doerflinger (July 30, 1910–December 23, 2000), was abook editor,stage magician, author, and noted Americanfolk song collector, with a particular interest in maritime songs (sea shanties).[1]
Growing up, Doerflinger spent his school days onStaten Island and holidays onLong Island Sound where he acquired an interest in the sea. He studied languages atPrinceton University and in his leisure time pursued the twin activities of stagemagic and folk song collecting. After his third year at Princeton he visitedNova Scotia where he performed magic shows and collected over 60 songs that formed the basis of his 1931 Princeton thesis "Shantymen and Shantyboys",[2][3] later the title of his major published folksong collection. After leaving Princeton he initially gained employment as a social worker, undertook graduate studies atHarvard, contributed book reviews to theSaturday Review of Literature, and eventually found work in publishing, where he spent the remainder of his career, interrupted for a period during the Second World War when he worked in North Africa and Italy with the Office of War Information in the area of in psychological warfare. During his career as an editor forE.P. Dutton andMacmillan Publishing he assisted a wide range of authors includingSir Edmund Hillary,Françoise Sagan andWoody Guthrie[4] whose autobiographyBound for Glory was edited/"organized" by Doerflinger's first wife, Joy (Homer), and published in 1943.[5] After his first wife's death in 1946 at the age of only 31,[6] he eventually remarried to her sister, the writerAnne Homer, the couple going on to have a further four children,[7] among them the historianThomas Main "Tom" Doerflinger (1952–2015), in addition to a daughter from his first marriage. Other than his collecting trips in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and New England, he collected a number of his songs from residents atSailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island, New York, which was set up as a retirement home for destitute sailors.
Doerflinger died at age 90 at his home in New Jersey on December 23, 2000, his second wife predeceased him by 5 years. He is commemorated in The William Main Doerflinger Memorial Sea Shanty Sessions at the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug Harbor[8][9] and a plaque at Staten Island commemorating his contribution to the canon of sea and lumber shanties.[10] A thread containing some reminiscences of Bill Doerflinger (in the context of his song collecting activities) is available on the "Mudcat Cafe" sitehere.
Doerflinger authored three books:The Middle Passage (1939, with Roland Barker), a historical novel about the Guinea Coast slave trade;Shantymen and Shantyboys (1951),[11] republished with additions in 1972 asSongs of the Sailorman and Lumberman,[12] documenting his major musical activity collecting songs from old sailors andlumberjacks between 1930 and 1950 (he recognised from early on that many of the men of coastal New England and Atlantic Canada spent only their summers at sea, and in the winter worked in the forest as lumberjacks, also known as shanty boys), andThe Magic Catalogue: A Guide to the Wonderful World of Magic (1977).[13]
His published collection of over 150 maritime and lumberjack songs is acknowledged as a source for the seminalShanties from the Seven Seas byStan Hugill[14] and includes the later well known song "The Leaving of Liverpool", which he collected twice from different singers in New York City, as well as others such as "(Bound for) South Australia" and "Poor Paddy Works on the Railway" which became popular in the folk revival of the 1950s-1960s. A subset of his field recordings from 1942, from a retired seaman "Captain" Patrick Tayluer in particular, were assisted by loan of equipment from theLibrary of Congress and are deposited there[15] (for some additional information on these recordings see the WikipediaLeaving of Liverpool page).
