Close your eyes when Gordon Bok sings and you might feel saltwater spray, hear wooden boats creaking or sense the love of the sea from those working marine-related jobs.
Bok, who grew up in Camden, Maine, performs Oct. 16 in Shoreline.
“My playground was a shipyard where my father worked and later was one of the owners. Those fellows were my role models.
“It was still a bit of a fishing port when I was a kid so I was familiar with fishing boats and the guys that manned them,” Bok said.
He started playing the guitar at age 9, then worked on boats after high school and started to collect sea songs.
Unhappy with the way many songs portrayed a life he knew and loved, he started writing songs based on experiences of people he knew. Later he toured the New England coast with the Hudson River Sloop Singers.
The sea is Bok’s metaphor.
“You see the world from there and you see the colors and other things. I think you can hear, in some of my music, some of the wave motion and rhythm associated with it,” he said.
The sea is a popular metaphor for other musicians, too.
“It’s interesting that you don’t have to know an awful lot about the sea to use it very effectively although I find songs by people who don’t know the sea well (often) miss the mark.”
Bok has been active in preserving, collecting, creating and sharing songs of land and sea. His music has been used in films and published in folk-music anthologies.
Maritime songs can be packaged in groups. There are the ballads of land people going to sea, songs written about events: shipwrecks, pulling a mule out of the ice, local fishing songs.
“I was attracted to those. I knew the boats. On the sea, we tended to make up whole songs about battles. There were also work songs, the chanties, that we don’t write anymore.”
Bok is also a storyteller.
“The people I grew up with don’t even think about it as storytelling. It’s the way they pass information or gossip.
“Most of the men … had things to say, or hunting stories (that) passed along information, maybe safety information, and it was a very live and unselfconscious thing to do.”
Case in point: When Bok was working on a schooner, the captain made mention of the way Bok was dressed.
“He then told me a story of a mate he’d had that had gone on deck in a loose, flapping raincoat to get the anchor … and was caught in the gears and was beat on the deck until he was dead. I never wore that coat on the deck again.
“That was their way of teaching. It was an interesting, emotionally charged method of teaching but it didn’t put you at fault,” Bok said.
“I’ve been to two large storytelling festivals and found that I’m uncomfortable. It was acting. I was uncomfortable that people memorized a story.”
But he’s never uncomfortable singing songs.
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