William Livingston Alden (1837-1908) was an American journalist, humorist, and author who wrote one of the earliest and most important American articles on sea shanties. His “Sailor Songs”, published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in July 1882, documented nearly twenty shanties with musical notation at a time when the living tradition was rapidly vanishing under steam power.

Alden was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and graduated from Jefferson College in 1858. He practiced law in New York City until 1866, when he turned to journalism. He wrote for Scribner’s Monthly, The Atlantic, and the New York World before joining the editorial staff of The New York Times, where he produced a weekly column called “Minor Topics.” He was also a pioneering figure in American recreational boating. In 1871 he founded the New York Canoe Club, the first canoeing organization in the country, and he later served as the inaugural Commodore of the American Canoe Association. His years on the New York waterfront during the 1860s and 1870s, when working sailing ships still crowded the harbor, likely provided firsthand exposure to the shanty tradition he would later document.

Alden was not a folk music collector in the scholarly sense. He writes from the perspective of one who had personally heard shanty-men perform, describing vocal techniques and subtle variations of expression that “can not be reproduced in print.” He classified shanties into pulling songs and windlass songs, noted the African-American origins of many melodies, and lamented that the shanty-man “has left no successors.” After 1882, Alden’s career took him abroad. He served as U.S. Consul General in Rome from 1885 to 1889, then lived in Paris and London, writing fiction and humor until his death in 1908.