Alex Sturbaum 2020
“I wanted there to be more explicitly LGBTQ songs in the folk tradition (after all, we’ve always been around), and while reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea”, it occurred to me that whaler’s wives had to sometimes fall in love.”
Alex Sturbaum: https://alexsturbaum.bandcamp.com/track/sweet-mary-starbuck
https://alexsturbaum.bandcamp.com/track/sweet-mary-starbuck
I married John Coffin just two years ago And he’s a fine man, as all Nantucket knows And he’s bound to make second mate, or so I hear If the Charles brings home enough oil next year At twenty a mother, at nineteen a bride With a child on my knee and another inside My heart it was broken, and swept out to sea Where my sweet Mary found it and brought it to me Chorus: Sweet Mary Starbuck from Nantucket town If she were the sea I would willingly drown And her voice like a bell on a clear winter’s day Sets my heart a-ringing and winging away At meeting one morning she came to me there With the Nantucket wind in her flyaway hair Her hand, soft and certain, clasped mine in the lane And I felt my heart shiver when she spoke my name Her words came in whispers, in trembling lines Her cheeks red as roses, her eyes all a-shine Then she kissed me so gently, so soft and so sure The world spun round once, and at once I was hersÿ On Nantucket our men go to hunt for the whale And they live at the mercy of teeth, sea, and gale But in town life goes on, and it goes on apace With children, and letters, and Mary’s sweet face So when John comes I’ll give him a kiss and a smile And a good whaleman’s wife I will be for a while And in time I’ll stand watching his sail fade at sea Then go home where my true love lies waiting for meÿ