The Bounty

The Bounty - Transmutations - Matthew DeChant

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This is an original shanty-style song of mine, about the famous Mutiny on the Bounty. These liner notes are already too long to relay the full story, but in short, the crew of the Bounty staged a successful and bloodless mutiny against their wildly unpopular and probably abusive captain William Bligh.
The accuracy of the crew’s account of the mutiny is debated, and there are valid historical reasons for doing so, but that doesn’t change the fact that the mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most successful mutinies in history and has embedded itself as the archetypal mutiny in pop culture. Mutiny, along with desertion, were for most of human history considered two of the most serious military crimes, and were both punishable by death. And yet both are victimless crimes- if they involve violence, that’s a different matter, but both are simply people who have been thrust into bad circumstances against their will taking steps to make their lives better. The military considers them heinous because they injure The Hierarchy, the god of all institutions. To them, and to other institutions, The Hierarchy is everything, and no amount of bloodshed is too much to preserve it. This goes for everything- governments, economies, corporations. None of these things are real. The people in them are real, and their effects are real, but they as things-in-themselves do not exist. People, we exist. And we deserve to protect ourselves.
I used a well-known old tune for this song, a tune with a long history of being used for progressive causes- John Brown’s Body, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Solidarity Forever, so on and so forth. And I have a neat personal connection to it- my old college roommate is a direct descendant of Julia Ward Howe, the writer who wrote the lyrics for Battle Hymn of the Republic.