One of my favorite 2023 releases was Letters to George. John Hollenbeck’s newest ensemble, George, included a tune “Grey Funnel Line,” the highlight of the album for me. Hollenbeck calls it an “old sailor song,” yet in this very modern group’s reworking, it doesn’t sound either old or particularly maritime-tinged.
Rather than starting at the chronological beginning, I want to give you a chance to discover the song the same way I did a few years ago:
Aurora Nealand’s vocals soar over some astonishing cymbal work from Hollenbeck. The tune is reharmonized to give it drama that a set of a standard folk harmonies couldn’t access, and that momentum accumulates over the course of several verses. In George’s hands, “Grey Funnel Line” becomes almost an anthem.
That is not how it started.
The tune was written by Cyril Tawney in 1959. The phrase “Grey Funnel Line” is a nickname for the Royal Navy (unlike on commercial ships, smokestacks on navy vessels were painted grey), and Tawney was indeed a sailor. By 1959, he had already established himself as a folk singer on radio and television, and he was just then leaving the navy behind to make a career out of music.
Here is the songwriter himself:
In keeping with the lyrics, the song has an elegiac feel, with a dash of sea shanty.
While “Grey Funnel Line” started there, we can trace some elements even further back. Tawney was familiar with American Ballads and Folk Songs, by John Lomax and Alan Lomax. One of the collected songs was “Dink’s Song,” recorded in Texas by John Lomax in 1909. Tawney was drawn to the first few lines:
Ef I had wings like Norah's dove,
I'd fly up the river to the man I love.
Fare thee well, O Honey, fare thee well.That verse, somewhat modified, finds its way into “Grey Funnel Line”:
But give me wings like Noah's dove
I'll fly up harbour to the girl I love
Just one more day on the Grey Funnel Line(Nealand settles the gender issue by singing “the one I love.”)
“Dink’s Song”—often titled “Fare Thee Well”—has had a particularly long life. It has been performed by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. As “Dink’s Blues,” it closes Waylon Jennings’s 2025 album, Songbird. Here’s one of the earliest recorded versions of the song, by Josh White:
Tawney, unsurprisingly, had good taste.
The lives of “Grey Funnel Line”
One of the earliest covers I’ve found is a version released in 1970 by Sara Grey with Ed Trickett, on their self-titled album. Grey and Trickett were associated with the “Golden Ring” scene of roots-music singers. Interestingly, this early appearance of Tawney’s shanty comes from the other side of the Atlantic. Grey, with her background in North Carolina’s mountain music, wouldn’t have found anything foreign here.
Grey’s rendition drops the guitar and adds more singers:
The contrast between unaccompanied solo vocal and the full chorus for the last line of each verse starts hinting at the emotional range that George would find in the song.
The song found a wider audience, and a few more musical tweaks, in 1972. The Clancy Brothers, an Irish group that had found fame in the American folk revival of the 1960s, included it on their album Save the Land. While they were experimenting with more modern sounds—the album includes an Elton John cover—their version of “Grey Funnel Line” comes closer to Tawney’s original than Sara Grey’s did.
The Clancy Brothers bring back the guitar and add at least one more. Like Grey, they alternate between a solo singer and a chorus at the end of each verse. The larger ensemble helps the bass notes ring out and gives the tune a lilt in line with its sea-shanty origins:
The next stop on our tour is the 1976 album Silly Sisters, a project of English folk singers Maddy Prior and June Tabor. Now that “Grey Funnel Line” was fully in circulation, bands developed a habit of using it for contrast. Tawney’s lyrics had given it gravity, and when instrumentalists started tinkering with the harmonies, they found depth there as well.
The album is full of twangy folk-rock, but “Grey Funnel Line,” once again, gets the a capella treatment. Prior and Tabor harmonize, and bassist Danny Thompson (himself son of a seaman) provides pedal tones like we’ve heard in no prior version:
This rendition has had a long life: It was used for the opening credits sequence in the 1994 Hugh Grant movie Sirens. Tabor continues to perform the song, as well, with a pop-tinged voice-and-piano version on her 2011 album, Ashore.
There’s more, of course. Once a song enters the folk canon, covers inevitably multiply. Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt recorded “Grey Funnel Line” for their 1987 platinum album, Trio, but it didn’t make the final cut. The public wouldn’t hear it until it was included on 2016’s The Complete Trio Collection.
Also in 2016, Tawney’s now-classic appeared on Written in Salt, the first full-length album released by the sea-shanty revival act The Longest Johns. Thanks to the English group’s knack for viral hits, they’ve probably exposed more listeners to the song than any other group.
Then, finally, we’re back to George. All those 1970s groups were playing folk music, not straying too far from the original. But most of the choices made by Hollenbeck and company have a precedent in those early renditions. Nealand’s voice is kept front and center: Dylan notwithstanding, you can’t have folk music if you don’t understand the words. The harmonies, while tweaked, are kept simple. A sequence of pedal points keeps the music moving forward.
George’s innovations are in texture—the leader’s frenetic drumming and Anna Webber’s saxophone colors—and large-scale form. The folkies thought in terms of single verses and choruses; Hollenbeck approaches the song as one six-minute-long unit. Perhaps it’s more drama than is warranted by the humdrum life of a sailor? Authentic or not, the 64-year life of “Grey Funnel Line” culminated in something special.