Folk Singer Hears Call of the Sea Chanteys

Thumb through a Billboard magazine these days and it seems there’s a chart for virtually every imaginable category of music: not just pop, R&B; and country, but also rap, dance music, Latin, gospel, jazz, world music, adult alternative, modern rock.

Everything, that is, except maybe . . . sea chanteys?

That’s OK with British singer Louis Killen, who has no delusions that the chanteys he specializes in will ever overtake Nirvana or P.M. Dawn at the top of the sales charts.

“I don’t even try to compete with or for the MTV generation,” said Killen, reached by phone recently in San Francisco, where he lives. “We all have to find our own niche out there.”

Killen, 59, discovered his niche after being enchanted as a child by the magic of words and music through family sing-alongs, storytelling and listening to the radio. (He’ll return the favor to Orange County listeners on Sunday, when he’ll be the in-studio guest on KSBR-FM’s (88.5) “Folk Roots” program from 6 to 8 p.m. It’s part of a series of Southland stops that includes performances Sunday afternoon in Anaheim and Monday at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments in Laguna Niguel.)

Killen, the youngest of four brothers, was born into a working-class family where singing together came as naturally as eating meals together.

“I grew up listening to my parents and brothers sing all the time,” Killen recalled. “We learned and sang everything by ear--we really had decent ears for harmony. And we sang everything from church and choir music to traditional Irish and folk songs.”

At age 7, he was inspired by George Formby, a Lancashire-based actor-comedian who played a mean ukulele.

“I heard George playing on the radio, and I started imitating him,” Killen said. ‘I kind of knew (then) that music would play a big role in my future.”

In fact, for more than 30 years as a solo artist and member for about six years of the Irish folk group the Clancy Brothers, Killen has amassed a large repertoire of traditional English ballads and folk songs. In the 1950s and ‘60s, he was a major player in the British folk revival and appeared with various artists on the 1961 Folkways album documenting that scene, “The British Revival.”

Thematically a storyteller focusing on the common man’s view of history, he sings songs about the plight of coal miners, textile workers, railroaders, craftsmen, laborers and sailors.

A maritime buff who fell in love with the sea as a boy, Killen specializes in the sea chantey, a musical style derived from the French word chanter, “to sing.”

“I loved reading sea chanteys ever since I was about 10 years old,” he said. “Those stories fired me up about the ocean and sailors.”

It was a 1951 recording of A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl’s “The Singing Sailor” that made the biggest impression upon Killen. “It blew my mind away. I mean, these guys sounded like sailors. It was singing from the gut,” said Killen, whose performing outlets consist largely of house concerts like the one he’s doing Sunday in Anaheim, small clubs such as the Shade Tree and folk and maritime festivals.

Unlike many forms of pop music created strictly as entertainment, the chantey was basically a work song.

“Chanteys were used long ago to coordinate the pulls of men hauling on the halyards and heaving on the capstans,” said Killen, who has crewed several ships on the East Coast and in the Caribbean.

Killen, volunteer coordinator at San Francisco’s Maritime Museum, said he’s drawn to chanteys because of the freedom that the sea and ships symbolize.

“Crew members were primarily drifters, and at times quite unemployable on land,” he said. “There’s a certain amount of that lifestyle in me.”

Over the years he has recorded 18 albums on his own and with the Clancys. On his latest, 1989’s “The Rose in June” (Knock Out), his full, unadorned baritone soars throughout and is particularly impressive on the title track, “The Jute Mill Song” and “The Last Leviathan.”

Skillfully bringing his phrasing and vocal dynamics to Andy Barnes’ “The Last Leviathan,” Killen makes this chilling tale of man’s blindness to his own greed reverberate with a sense of urgency.

Killen has been in the studio recently recording a new batch of songs he hopes to release before Christmas. There won’t, however, be any sea chanteys on this one.

“The new material is emotionally charged: big songs, ballads . . . all done a cappella,” he said. “You know what I mean--heavy songs about life, death and possible resurrection.”

Killen, who understands the value of minimal instrumental embellishment, performs about two-thirds of his songs a cappella, but he also is a skilled concertina player.

Even if he never reaches the level of mass acceptance bestowed upon MTV-created pop stars, Killen takes solace in his role as a link in the chain that is the folk-music tradition.

“To me, folk music springs from the unconscious reflection a community has of itself,” Killen said. “It’s their music, their experience. My survival is based on how the audiences respond to my singing and stories. When we ‘connect,’ I can’t even describe the charge I get . . . except that it validates what I’m doing.”

Louis Killen performs Sunday at 3 p.m. at a house concert in Anaheim. $10. Call (714) 535-3059 for reservations and directions. He also performs Monday at 8 p.m. at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. $10. (714) 364-5270.