The Keel Row

The Keel Row is an old Tyneside song and dance tune in which a lass sings of her sweetheart Johnnie, a keelman working the coal boats on the River Tyne.

The keel of the title is not part of a ship but a whole boat. Keels were broad, shallow-draught barges that carried coal down the River Tyne to the colliers (seagoing ships built to carry coal) waiting in deeper water, since the river was too shallow for them to come up to the coal. Each keel had a crew of a skipper, two men, and a boy, who rowed or sailed her down on the ebb tide and then shovelled the coal up into the collier by hand. The Tyneside keelmen lived in Sandgate, the crowded quarter outside Newcastle’s town walls where the song begins, and in the 18th century many of them were known by the blue bonnets they wore at work.

The tune is older than any printed text. It appears under its present name in a Northumbrian manuscript of 1752, the John Smith manuscript, now lost but known from a copy made by John Stokoe in the 1880s, and again in William Vickers’s Tyneside tune book of 1770. The first printed words came from Edinburgh, in Charles Maclean’s Collection of Favourite Scots Tunes of the 1770s, with the singer walking through the Canongate instead of Sandgate. Frank Kidson suspected it began as a Jacobite air, and whether the tune is Scottish or English is still unsettled. Joseph Ritson’s Northumberland Garland and Cuthbert Sharp’s Bishoprick Garland (1834) both carried versions, Sharp’s showing that it was sung on the River Wear as well.

The second and third verses here are later additions, taken from Thomas Thompson’s “New Keel Row,” printed in 1827. By 1838 The Athenaeum called the song the keelmen’s own favorite and “the most popular melody on the Tyne,” and bands played it when the keelmen paraded through the town each year to mark the founding of their Keelmen’s Hospital.

Coal staiths and steam tugs put the keelmen out of work over the 19th century, but the tune found a second career in the army as the trot march of the cavalry and the Royal Horse Artillery. In “The Rout of the White Hussars” (1888), Rudyard Kipling wrote that “the man who has never heard that tune rising, high and shrill, above the rattle of the Regiment going past the saluting-base, has something yet to hear and understand.” Gateshead-born Louis Killen recorded the song on A Seaman's Garland: Sailors, Ships & Chanteys Vol. 2 (1997).

Leish is a Northumbrian word meaning lithe or athletic, so “sae leish, sae blithe, sae bonny” means “so lithe, so cheerful, so handsome.”