Merchant shipping inspires balladeers

We've hit the road and ridden the rails ... now it's time to turn our attention to songs about water transportation. But they were harder to find than we expected. While tunes about big rigs on lonesome highways and the good old days of freight trains abound, it seems very few songwriters have been inspired by cargo ships. Still, we did turn up a few examples. (You can hear them all on YouTube.):

• "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," by Gordon Lightfoot, tells the gripping, true tale of a Great Lakes freighter that went down in a winter storm ("With a load of iron ore 26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty ...").
• "The Lock Keeper," by the late Stan Rogers, lays out a poignant conversation between a lock keeper on the St. Lawrence Seaway and a merchant ship's officer. ("We're laden even deeper than the time before, Oriental oils and tea brought down from Singapore.")
• Rogers also wrote "The Watch," about a man who sees parallels between his unhappy retirement and a once-proud merchant ship that's about to be scrapped. ("It's the last watch on the Midland ... the last night she's whole.")
• "Barges" is a favorite at every summer camp. ("Silently flows the river to the sea, and the barges too go silently.") Ask your kids to sing it for you!
• Who doesn't remember Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song" ("Day-O! Da-a-ay-O!"), about Caribbean longshoremen loading bananas on boats headed for North America and Europe?