"The Mary Ellen Carter" is a song written and first recorded by Stan Rogers in 1979. It tells the story of a heroic effort to salvage a sunken ship, the eponymous Mary Ellen Carter, by members of her crew.
Original version
The song chronicles the efforts to salvage the ship, implying that it will be raised on the following day:
We've patched her rents, stopped her vents,
Dogged hatch and porthole down,
Put cables to her fore and aft
And girded her around.
Tomorrow noon, we'll hit the air
And then take up the strain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.
The song ends with an inspirational message to people "to whom adversity has dealt the final blow": Never give up, and, "like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!"
The Bristolian folk group The Longest Johns released a rendition of the song in 2020.[5]
Legacy
As a tribute to Stan Rogers, "The Mary Ellen Carter" has been sung to close the annual Winnipeg Folk Festival every year since his death.[6]
During the finale of the Annual Summerfolk Music and Crafts Festival held in Owen Sound, Ontario, "The Mary Ellen Carter" is sung together by many of the weekend festival's performers and the audience in tribute to Stan Rogers, who was one of the festival's original supporters and after whom the main stage was named.[7][8]
Connection to the sinking of the Marine Electric
On February 12, 1983 the ship Marine Electric was carrying a load of coal from Norfolk, Virginia to a power station in Somerset, Massachusetts. The worst storm in forty years blew up that night, and the ship sank at about four o'clock in the morning on February 13. The ship's chief mate, 59-year-old Robert M. "Bob" Cusick, was trapped in the deckhouse as the ship went down. His snorkeling experience helped him avoid panic and swim to the surface, but he was left to spend the night alone on a partially deflated lifeboat he eventually reached, in water barely above freezing and air much colder. Huge seas washed over him, and each time he was not sure that he would ever reach the surface again to breathe. Battling hypothermia, he was tempted to allow himself to fall unconscious and be washed away. Just then he remembered the concluding stanzas of "The Mary Ellen Carter".[9]
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
Rise again, rise again—though your heart it be broken
Or life about to end.
No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
As Cusick tells in One Warm Line, a documentary about Rogers, he started to sing it and soon was alternately shouting out "Rise again, rise again" and holding his breath as the seas washed over him.[10][11] At seven o'clock that morning a Coast Guard helicopter spotted him and pulled him to safety.[9] Only three men of the thirty-four who had been aboard survived the wreck. After his ordeal, Cusick wrote a letter to Stan Rogers telling him what had happened and crediting the song with saving his life. In response, Rogers invited Cusick to attend what turned out to be the second-to-last concert Rogers ever performed. Cusick lived another 30 years, and his testimony and activism in the aftermath of the accident spurred far-reaching maritime safety reforms.[12]
