Talk:Blow the Man Down

Liverpool?

Brewer's Phrase & Fable lists this as Paradise Street in Poole, Dorset, has no mention of the Black Ball verse, and says that it is about being Pressganged

As Poole and Weymouth were far more renowned for the Press Gangs that operated there than was Liverpool, I think this needs more verification & citation before the Liverpool reference is taken as absolute

chrisboote (talk) 08:38, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

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"Queer double entendre" section is very suspect

The only part of this section that's sourced is the first line: "This song's title and many of the verses are queerly suggestive of gay sexual practices[.]" However, a look at the second source shows that this appears to be a bit of a misunderstanding of the text. Here is the relevant paragraph in the biography about Capote:

"Furthermore, when the foursome boards the SS Nyanga, the ship that carries them to Africa, they repeatedly sing 'Blow the Man Down' for approximately thirty seconds of screen time. The song is, of course, a well-known sea shanty, but its titles is also queerly suggestive. (Indeed, if Capote did not intend anything queer in this peculiar moment of homosocial camaraderie and song, viewers attuned to a queer sensibility could nevertheless see in it an allusion to homosexuality. For example, novelist Don Holliday, author of such 1950s and 1960s pulpy queer fiction as The Sin Travelers, AC-DC Lover, and So Sweet, So Soft, So Queer, took advantage of the double entendre of the phrase "Blow the Man Down" for one of his titles.) Within the homosocial world of Peterson, O'Hara, Ross, and Ravello, desires are so focused on pecuniary gain that no trace of heterosexual, or even heterosocial, desire remains, rendering them a queer troupe indeed."

The only thing even remotely relevant here is that Don Holliday and the author personally think that the song is suggestive. That hardly seems worth including on this page. The first source is even worse. It's a book about homosexual tendencies and behaviors among sailors and it doesn't even mention the song "Blow the Man Down". And as for the list of alleged innuendos, that is entirely original research on the part of whoever wrote that section.

I was just going to note this on the talk page, but now that I have all of that written out, I feel confident enough to just delete the section myself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pandarsson (talk • contribs) 21:05, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

-like- Alexandermoir (talk) 23:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Meaning of chorus

A common phrase heard in English pubs is "is that a dead man/soldier/marine" when asking if a glass or bottle is empty. I've always understood that "blowing the man down" means drinking up. Likewise "bullies" is slang for mates, not for a nasty piece of work. The chorus:

    Way hey blow the man down
    Give me some time to blow the man down!

can be translated as:

    Come on, drink up
    Give me some time to drink up

Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:31, 11 December 2020 (UTC)