Jon Campbell’s songs have a nautical flavor and travel well, often passing from musician to musician.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

In 2006, singer-songwriter Jon Campbell and his girlfriend, Marilyn Bellemore, both of Narragansett, were in Astoria, Ore., listening to some music in a bar. They were in town for the Fisher Poets Gathering, an annual meeting of poets and songwriters who celebrate the maritime life.

The band was Shanghaied On the Willamette, and they began to sing an a cappella song in a familiar shanty form. According to Bellemore, Campbell was engaged in conversation and didn’t hear the words:

So haul your sheets back with one hand

Set your drink down if you can

And we’ll never sail out of sight of land!

Tanqueray Martini-O!

Bellemore interrupted Campbell and asked, “Didn’t you write this song?”

Campbell listened a moment: “Yeah, I did.”

She recalls that he went up to the band after their set and asked them, “Did you ever meet the guy who wrote that song?”

They replied that they hadn’t; that they’d learned it from someone in Seattle who couldn’t remember where he’d heard it first.

“Well,” Campbell said, “now you have.”

It wasn’t the last time Campbell and Bellemore found Campbell’s songs coming out of other people’s mouths. And last June in Mystic, Conn., after they heard Carl Thornton do a fado-flavored version of Campbell’s “Keep On’ Fishin’ ” — about a commercial fishing crew who lose a member their first day out and, after considering the income they’ll lose by coming home to take care of the body, press on with the trip — Bellemore had an idea.

The result is “Yup, I Said That,” a compilation of 15 songs by Campbell as recorded by other artists, ranging from Washington state’s Wesley “Geno” Leech to Rhode Island’s own Pendragon. In the process, they show the breadth and depth of Campbell’s songwriting talent, as they illustrate life in and around Rhode Island, on and near the water, in songs that are alternately silly and heartbreaking.

The disc opens with Leech reciting Campbell’s spoken-word ode to the “Quonset Hut” and the Willamette version of “Tanqueray Martini-O” (a song that Tommy Makem also covered, although his version isn’t here) that sparked the disc. But along with humorous tunes such as those, and Robbie O’Connell’s version of “Frederick’s of Galilee,” There’s also “Providence Waltz” (sung by The Gnomes’ Peter Breen), a lovely encapsulation of the one or two degrees of separation in the city; and “The Mary” and “The Last of the Eastern Rigs,” both poignant tales of the end of proud fishing vessels.

Bellemore took the lead in compiling the disc, relying on Internet searches and Campbell’s remembrances, in tracking down various versions of Campbell’s songs. Most of them had already been recorded, and some quite a while ago — you can hear the vinyl popping and cracking during Pendragon’s “Restless Waters.” In other cases, people who don’t usually record set up hasty, lo-fi sessions to capture their renditions.

“These songs weren’t assigned,” Bellemore says. But the common denominator, she adds, was that “people were elated that we would even ask them.”

“It was fantastic to hear other peoples’ interpretations of his music. And he felt the same way,” Bellemore says. “He doesn’t talk much about it, but I know it makes him happy.”

It does take Campbell a while to get to talking seriously about his own work, but he’s serious about the way of life that he’s capturing.

Campbell, 58, grew up in Wakefield, came from a fishing family and worked on some fishing boats in his youth, as well as sailing boats in later years. He’s quick to claim, however, that “I’m a musician, not a fisherman.… I was in it long enough, and I’m around it enough, that I got the flavor. I know how to talk the talk. And that’s enough, I guess.”

As for writing songs, he says, “I just started it because I was no good at doing anyone else’s stuff.” As for what attracted him to writing about life in Rhode Island, he says, “Someone said to me early on, ‘Write about what you know about.’ I figured the best love songs have already been written; I don’t know enough about cowboying to write cowboy songs; I don’t like the hours that it takes to be in a heavy metal band. So this is what I do.”

The juxtaposition of humor and heavier themes reaches its apex during Thornton’s “Keep On Fishin’,” in which an accident kills a fishing ship’s cook on the first day out. “Some of us thought he never looked better,” goes one of the verses, but the chorus explains the situation: “We got fuel and ice to pay/ And we just steamed out yesterday/ He was a real good hand, and we sure will miss him/ But we iced him down and we kept on fishin’.”

Campbell says that that sort of thing happens naturally if you just let the subject matter take you where it leads: “They’re snapshots of what life is like around here. And the humorous stuff really does reflect the attitude of the people I associate with. I’m not stealing lines from them, but you’re alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, optimistic and pessimistic. And the only way to deal with that is humor.…

“If you get an idea, why shouldn’t you pursue it? I don’t have a persona that I have to write to. This isn’t a manufactured thing in any way. It’s whatever occurs to me. The subjects I deal with kind of guide how the songs are

The song, by the way, is based on a true story: “I don’t necessarily make these stories up,” Campbell says; “I just make ’em rhyme.” And if that sounds glib, he explains, “People approach you like making up a song is a mystifying process, which it’s not, I don’t think.… You have your own stories, and your own way to tell those stories.”

The Rhode Island-based, Celtic-inspired band Pendragon is on the disc twice, with “Restless Waters,” an ode to the urge to sail away, and the ballad of the ghost ship “The Palatine.” Singer Mary Lee Partington says she’s “thrilled to have the place on it that we do” and calls Campbell, some of whose lyrics and poems have been published in “What a Difference a Bay Makes,” the Rhode Island Historical Society’s history of Narragansett Bay, “a professor of place.”

Partington praises Campbell’s “Everyman approach to what he writes,” and adds that “Jon is one who can take life’s to’s and fro’s in stride. He’s very funny, and when you see a more melancholy side of his reflections, he’s speaking on behalf of all of us.”

Campbell says he was surprised at how many versions of his songs were out there, and he proudly chalks it up to the folk process.

“People are passing [the music] hand to hand; they’re not necessarily getting it off my CDs, which to me is just about perfect. That’s maybe not what everyone else would want, but in kind of a perverse way, that pleases me.”

He says it doesn’t bother him that his songs are out there but his name isn’t, necessarily.

“My attitude [is] ‘Hey, if you’re doing it, I don’t have to. You can get out there and sing this song; I’ll go on to the next thing.’ I like making songs; I don’t really like being a human jukebox and doing them over and over.”

Campbell plays only about a dozen gigs a year, and not many of them are in the southern New England area. He says that’s enough for him. “It’s not a vocation; it’s a grandiose hobby. I don’t think, in a given year, it’s ever amounted to much other than the stories we can tell when it’s all over.”

And while Campbell and Bellemore both point out that the disc will give exposure to some of the lesser-known acts on it, they both use the same word to describe their own feelings on hearing so many of Campbell’s songs laid end-to-end.

“It’s gratifying that Tommy Makem had 10,000 songs to pick from when he was making a record and he chose one of mine,” Campbell says. “When anyone takes the time to learn your stuff, it’s very gratifying. And I find my stuff sort of personal; I find it surprising that people find something in it for themselves.”

“It’s gratifying that people love his music,” Bellemore says, “and to see people enjoy it even more now.”

“Yup, I Said That” is available at Grateful Heart in Wickford, Belmont Market and Looney Tunes in South Kingstown and at www.celticamusic.com.

rmassimo@projo.com