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A sea shanty, shanty, chantey, or chanty () is a genre of traditional Folk music that was once commonly sung as a work song to accompany rhythmical labor aboard large Merchant vessel Sailing ship. The term shanty most accurately refers to a specific style of work song belonging to this historical repertoire. However, in recent, popular usage, the scope of its definition is sometimes expanded to admit a wider range of repertoire and characteristics, or to refer to a "maritime work song" in general.
From Latin cantare via French chanter, the word shanty emerged in the mid-19th century in reference to an appreciably distinct genre of work song, developed especially on merchant vessels, that had come to prominence in the decades prior to the American Civil War.Hugill, Stan, Shanties from the Seven Seas: Shipboard Work-songs and Songs Used as Work-songs from the Great Days of Sail, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1961) p. 6. Shanty songs functioned to synchronize and thereby optimize labor, in what had then become larger vessels having smaller crews and operating on stricter schedules.Doerflinger, William Main, Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman, Mayerbooks (1990) pp. 96–7. The practice of singing shanties eventually became ubiquitous internationally and throughout the era of wind-driven Packet ship and .
Shanties had antecedents in the working chants of British and other national maritime traditions, such as those sung while manually loading vessels with cotton in ports of the southern United States. Shanty repertoire borrowed from the contemporary popular music enjoyed by sailors, including Minstrel show, popular marches, and land-based Folk music, which were then adapted to suit musical forms matching the various labor tasks required to operate a sailing ship. Such tasks, which usually required a coordinated group effort in either a pulling or pushing action, included weighing anchor and setting sail.
The shanty genre was typified by flexible lyrical forms, which in practice provided for much improvisation and the ability to lengthen or shorten a song to match the circumstances. Its hallmark was call and response, performed between a soloist and the rest of the workers in chorus. The leader, called the shantyman, was appreciated for his piquant language, lyrical wit, and strong voice. Shanties were sung without instrumental accompaniment and, historically speaking, they were only sung in work-based rather than entertainment-oriented contexts. Although most prominent in English, shanties have been created in or translated into other European languages.
The switch to Steamboat and the use of machines for shipboard tasks by the end of the 19th century meant that shanties gradually ceased to serve a practical function. Their use as work songs became negligible in the first half of the 20th century. Information about shanties was preserved by veteran sailors and folklorist song-collectors, and their written and Audio recording work provided resources that would later support a revival in singing shanties as a land-based leisure activity. Commercial musical recordings, popular literature, and other media, especially since the 1920s, have inspired interest in shanties among s. Contemporary performances of these songs range from the "traditional" style of maritime music to various modern music genres.
The phenomenon of using songs or chants, in some form, to accompany sea labor preceded the emergence of the term "shanty" in the historical record of the mid-19th century. One of the earliest published uses of this term for such a song came in G. E. Clark's Seven Years of a Sailor's Life, 1867.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, p. 20. Narrating a voyage in a clipper ship from Bombay to New York City in the early 1860s, Clark wrote, "The anchor came to the bow with the chanty of 'Oh, Riley, Oh,' and 'Carry me Long,' and the tug walked us toward the wharf at Brooklyn."Clark, George Edward, Seven Years of a Sailor's Life, Adams & Co. (1867) p. 165. While telling of another voyage out of Provincetown, Mass. in 1865, he wrote:
Every man sprang to duty. The cheerful chanty was roared out, and heard above the howl of the gale. The cable held very hard, and when it surged over, the windlass sent the men flying about the deck, as if a galvanic battery had been applied to their hands. The vessel's head was often buried in the solid seas, and the men, soaked and sweating, yelled out hoarsely, "Paddy on the Railway", and "We're Homeward Bound", while they tugged at the brakes, and wound the long, hard cable in, inch by inch.Clark, Seven Years, p. 312.Additionally, Clark referred to a lead singer as a "chanty man", and he referred to unloading cargo from the vessels as "chanty men" and a "chanty gang".Clark, Seven Years, p. 41, 44.
This reference to singing stevedores as "chanty men" connects the genre to a still earlier reference to chanty-man as the foreman of a work gang and the lead singer of their songs. Around the late 1840s, Charles Nordhoff observed work gangs engaged in a type of labor called "cotton-screwing" in Mobile Bay. Characterized by Nordhoff as one of the heaviest sorts of labor, cotton-screwing involved the use of large to compress and force cotton bales into the holds of outbound ships. Work gangs consisted of four men, who timed their exertions in turning the jack-screw to songs called chants.
Singing, or chanting as it is called, is an invariable accompaniment to working in cotton, and many of the screw-gangs have an endless collection of songs, rough and uncouth, both in words and melody, but answering well the purposes of making all pull together, and enlivening the heavy toil. The foreman is the chanty-man, who sings the song, the gang only joining in the chorus, which comes in at the end of every line, and at the end of which again comes the pull at the screw handles ...
The chants, as may be supposed, have more of rhyme than reason in them. The tunes are generally plaintive and monotonous, as are most of the capstan tunes of sailors, but resounding over the still waters of the Bay, they had a fine effect.Nordhoff, Charles, The Merchant Vessel, Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Co. (1855) pp. 40–1.
According to research published in the journal American Speech, Schreffler argues that chanty may have been a back derivation from chanty-man, which, further, initially carried the connotation of a singing stevedore (as in Nordhoff's account, above). The historical record shows shanty (and its variant spellings) gaining currency only in the late nineteenth century; the same repertoire was earlier referred to as "song", "chant", or "chaunt".Schreffler, Gibb. "The Execrable Term: A Contentious History of chanty". American Speech 92.4 (2017): 429-458. .
Addressing the Royal Musical Association in 1915, English musicologist Richard Runciman Terry put forward his belief that the genre should be spelled with "sh" on the grounds that the spelling should correspond obviously to pronunciation.Terry, Richard Runciman, "Sea Songs and Shanties", Journal of the Royal Music Association 11(41) (1915) pp. 135–140. In his subsequent shanty collections he used this spelling consistently.Terry, Richard Runciman, The Shanty Book, Part I, J. Curwen & Sons (1921); The Shanty Book, Part II, J. Curwen & Sons (1926). American shanty-collector Joanna Colcord made great use of Terry's first book (corresponding with the author, and reprinting some of his material), and she, too, deemed it sensible to adopt the "sh" spelling for her 1924 collection.
Terry's works were the source for those among the earliest of commercial recordings (see below) and popular performances of shanties—especially because, unlike many earlier works, they provided Sheet music with piano accompaniment and sufficiently long, performance-ready sets of lyrics. Colcord's work was also very handy in this regard and was used as a source by prominent British folk revival performers like A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl. Terry and Colcord's works were followed by numerous shanty collections and scores that also chose to use the "Sh" spelling,e.g.: Harris, S. Taylor, Six Sea Shanties, Boosey (1925); Sampson, John, The Seven Seas Shanty Book, Boosey (1927); Fox Smith, Cicely, A Book of Shanties, Methuen (1927). whereas others remained insistent that "ch" be retained to preserve what they believed to be the etymological origins of the term.Bone, David William, Capstan Bars, The Porpoise Press (1931). By the late 20th century, the "Sh" spelling had become the more or less standard one in Commonwealth English,e.g.: Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition (1989). whereas "ch" spellings remained in common use mostly in the United States.This is attested by its use by institutions such as maritime museums and the U.S. Library of Congress.
During the 1920s, the phrase came into regular use by lay commentators,e.g.: "Sea Chanteys Kept Alive. Sailors' Club in London is Collecting and Preserving the Old Songs of Sail", New York Times (7 Nov. 1926); Thomas, J.E., Lucy E. Broadwood, Frank Howes, and Frank Kidson, "Sea Shanties", Journal of the Folk-Song Society 8(32) (1928) pp. 96–100. though it was not documented in use by sailors themselves, nor has it been used by knowledgeable authors on the subject such as Stan Hugill. The term "sea shanty/chantey" has become a staple of popular usage, where it helps to disambiguate the work song genre from other meanings of the word "shanty". For example, the "ice fishing shanty", despite its reference to marine activity, is not related.
It requires, however, some dexterity and address to manage the handspec to the greatest advantage; and to perform this the sailors must all rise at once upon the windlass, and, fixing their bars therein, give a sudden jerk at the same instant, in which movement they are regulated by a sort of song or howl pronounced by one of their number.Falconer, William, An Universal Dictionary of the Marine, New Edition, T. Cadell (1784).
Rather than the well-developed songs that characterize shanties, this "howl" and others were evidently structured as simple chants in the manner of "1, 2, 3!" The same dictionary noted that French sailors said just that, and gave some indication what an English windlass chant may have been like:
UN, deux, troi, an exclamation, or song, used by seamen when hauling the bowlines, the greatest effort being made at the last word. English sailors, in the same manner, call out on this occasion,—haul-in—haul-two—haul-belay!Falconer, An Universal Dictionary of the Marine.
Such simple or brief chants survived into the 19th century. First-hand observers such as Frederick Pease Harlow, a sailor of the 1870s, attested to their ubiquity, saying that they were brought into use whenever a brief task required one.Harlow, Frederick Pease, Chanteying Aboard American Ships, Barre Publishing Co. (1962). In historical hindsight these items have come to be generically called "sing-outs"; yet even before the known advent of the term shanty, Richard Henry Dana referred to "singing out".
The wind was whistling through the rigging, loose ropes flying about; loud and, to me, unintelligible orders constantly given and rapidly executed, and the sailors "singing out" at the ropes in their hoarse and peculiar strains.Dana, Richard Henry Jr., Two Years Before the Mast, Harper & Brothers (1840) p. 11.
Later writers distinguished such chants and "sing-outs" from shanties proper, but in the case of relatively "simple" shanties—such as those for hauling sheets and tacks (see below)—there is a grey area. This has led some to believe that the more sophisticated shanties of later years developed from the more primitive chants.e.g. Fox Smith, Cicely, A Book of Shanties, Methuen & Co. (1927).
When we came to mast-head the top-sail yards, with all hands at the halyards, we struck up "Cheerily, men," with a chorus which might have been heard half way to Staten Land.Dana, Richard Henry Jr., Two Years Before the Mast, Harper & Brothers (1840) p. 413.
The decks were all life and commotion; the sailors on the forecastle singing, "Ho, cheerly men!" as they catted the anchor;Melville, Herman, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, John Murray (1847) p. 151.
Although "Cheer'ly Man" could be considered more "developed" than the average sing-out, in its form it is yet different from the majority of shanties that are known to us today, suggesting that it belonged to an earlier stage of sailors' songs that preceded the emergence of "modern" shanties.
Detailed reference to shipboard practices that correspond to shanty-singing was extremely rare before the 1830s. In the first place, singing while working was generally limited to merchant ships, not war ships. The Royal Navy banned singing during work—it was thought the noise would make it harder for the crew to hear commands—though capstan work was accompanied by the bosun's pipe,Lowell, James Russell, ed., "Songs of the Sea," Atlantic Monthly 2(9) (July 1858) p. 153. or else by fife and drum or fiddle.Rodger, Nicholas, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815, Penguin/Allen Lane (2004) p. 503. A writer from the 1830s made this clear: , from The Quid (1832)]]
On board a well-disciplined man-of-war, no person except the officers is allowed to speak during the performance of the various evolutions. When a great many men are employed together, a fifer or a fiddler usually plays some of their favourite tunes; and it is quite delightful to see the glee with which Jack will "stamp and go", keeping exact time to "Jack's the lad", or the "College Hornpipe".B., R., "A Cruise of a Revenue Cutter," The United Service Journal Part 1. (Jan. 1834) p. 68.
Fife and fiddle were also used, in earlier times, for work aboard merchant vessels.B., O.P., "My Adventures (Part VI)," The Rural Repository 12(23) (16 April 1836) p. 180.
One of the earliest references to shanty-like songs that has been discovered was made by an anonymous "steerage passenger" in a log of a voyage of an East India Company ship, entitled The Quid (1832). Crew and passengers alike were noted to join in at heaving the capstan around. They were said to sing "old ditties", along with which a few verses to one or more songs is given."Steerage passenger," The Quid, or Tales of my Messmates, W. Strange (1832) pp. 222–3. While this practice was analogous to the practice of what is later called singing "capstan shanties", the form of these verses is not particularly similar to later shanties. These songs do not appear to correspond to any shanty known from later eras. It is possible that the long, monotonous task of heaving the capstan had long inspired the singing of time-passing songs of various sorts, such as those in The Quid. For example, the composition of capstan-style "sailor songs" by Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland as early as 1838Wergeland, Henrik Arnold, Henrik Wergelands Samlede Skrifter, ed. by Hartvig Lassen, Chr. Tonsberg Forlag (1853). implies that Scandinavians also used such songs. However, these older songs can be distinguished from the later type of songs that were given the label shanty, suggesting there were other formative influences that gave birth to an appreciably new and distinctly recognized phenomenon."The Advent and Development of Chanties," discussion dated 20 March 2010 ff., The Mudcat Café
In the first few decades of the 19th century, European-American culture, especially the Anglophone—the sailors' "Cheer'ly Man" and some capstan songs notwithstanding—was not known for its work songs. By contrast, African workers, both in Africa and in the New World, were widely noted to sing while working. According to Gibb Schreffler, an Associate Professor of Music at Pomona College, European observers found African work-singers remarkable (as Schreffler infers from tone of their descriptions). Schreffler further infers that work songs may have had far less currency among European culture, based on the scant evidence of work-singing aboard European ships in the century prior.Schreffler, "Ethnic Choices," p. 1. Such references begin to appear in the late 18th century, whence one can see the cliché develop that Black Africans "could not" work without singing. For example, an observer in Martinique in 1806 wrote, "The negroes have a different air and words for every kind of labour; sometimes they sing, and their motions, even while cultivating the ground, keep time to the music.""Dances of the Negroes of the Island of Martinico." Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine (May 1806): 202–3. So while the depth of the African-American work song traditions is now recognized,e.g.: Giola, Ted, Work Songs, Duke UP (2006). in the early 19th century they stood in stark contrast to the paucity of such traditions among European-Americans. Thus while European sailors had learned to put short chants to use for certain kinds of labor, the paradigm of a comprehensive system of developed work songs for most tasks may have been contributed by the direct involvement of or through the imitation of African-Americans. The work contexts in which African-Americans sang songs comparable to shanties included:
During the first half of the 19th century, some of the songs African-Americans sang also began to appear in use for shipboard tasks, i.e. as shanties.Schreffler, "Ethnic Choices," pp. 1–2. An example of a work song that was shared between several contexts, including, eventually, sailors working, is "Grog Time o' Day". This song, the tune of which is now lost, was sung by: Jamaican stevedores at a capstan in 1811;Hay, Robert, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay 1789–1847, ed. by M.D. Hay (1953). Afro-Caribbeans rowing a boat in Antigua ca.1814;British Naval Officer, Service Afloat, Edward C. Mielke (1833) p. 259. Black stevedores loading a steamboat in New Orleans in 1841; Negro Singer's Own Book (ca. 1843–45) p. 337. and a European-American crew hauling halyards on a clipper-brig out of New York ca.1840s."An Old Salt," "Quarter-deck yarns; or, Memorandums from My Log Book," in The Evergreen; or Gems of Literature for MDCCL, ed. by Rev. Edward A. Rice, J. C. Burdick (1850) p. 11. Other such multi-job songs were: "Round the Corn(er), Sally", "Fire Down Below", "Johnny Come Down to Hilo", "Hilo, Boys, Hilo", "Tommy's Gone Away", "The Sailor Likes His Bottle-O", "Highland Laddie", "Mudder Dinah", "Bully in the Alley", "Hogeye Man", "Good Morning, Ladies, All", "Pay Me the Money Down", "Alabama, John Cherokee", "Yankee John, Stormalong", and "Heave Away (My Johnnies)".
While the non-sailor occupations noted above were mainly within the purview of Black laborers, the last of them, cotton-screwing, was one in which non-Blacks also began to engage by the 1840s. These workers often came from the ranks of sailors of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, including sailors from Britain and Ireland who, wanting to avoid the cold winter seasons on the Atlantic, went ashore to engage in the well-paid labor of cotton-screwing.Nordhoff, The Merchant Vessel, p. 43. A European-American who did just that in 1845 in New Orleans wrote,
The day after our arrival the crew formed themselves into two gangs and obtained employment at screwing cotton by the day ... With the aid of a set of jack-screws and a ditty, we would stow away huge bales of cotton, singing all the while. The song enlivened the gang and seemed to make the work much easier.Erskine, Charles, Twenty Years Before the Mast, George W. Jacobs & Co. (1896) pp. 296–7.
Shanty-writer Stan Hugill called Mobile Bay—one of the main cotton outports—a "shanty mart", at which sailors and laborers of different cultural backgrounds traded their songs.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, p. 17.
Along the African coast you will hear that dirge-like strain in all their songs, as at work or paddling their canoes to and from shore, they keep time to the music. On the southern plantations you will hear it also, and in the negro melodies every where, plaintive and melodious, sad and earnest. It seems like the dirge of national degradation, the wail of a race, stricken and crushed, familiar with tyranny, submission and unrequited labor ... And here I cannot help noticing the similarity existing between the working chorus of the sailors and the dirge-like negro melody, to which my attention was specially directed by an incident I witnessed or rather heard.Allen, Isaac. "Songs of the Sailor." Oberlin Student's Monthly 1(2) (Dec. 1858). p. 48.
The author went on to relate an incident in which he once heard "a well known strain of music", finding to his surprise that it was being sung by Black men rowing canoes. He claimed they were singing, "Heigh Jim along, Jim along Josey, Heigh Jim along, Jim along Jo!"Allen, "Songs of the Sailor," p. 49. The implication is that this song was similar to a sailor song, probably the well-known shanty, "Haul Away, Joe" or "Haul Away for Rosie", viz.: "Way, haul away; O, haul away, my Rosey; Way, haul away; O, haul away, Joe."As in: Adams, On Board the Rocket, p. 312. The writer did not make a further connection to the Minstrel show "Jim Along Josey","Jim Along Josey," Firth and Hall (1840), at The Library of Congress American Memory Collection. a relationship to which is obvious, although it is unknown whether this was the inspiration for the shanty or vice versa.
In much of the shanty repertoire known today one finds parallels to the minstrel songs that came to popularity from the 1840s.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, p. 14. The poetic meter of the couplets of many minstrel songs is identical to those in shanties, and the non sequitur-type "floating verses" of those songs were heavily borrowed. In an influential early article about shanties, New York journalist William L. Alden drew a comparison between shanties and both authentic African-American songs and the quasi-African-American minstrel songs:
The old sailor songs had a peculiar individuality. They were barbaric in their wild melody. The only songs that in any way resemble them in character are "Dixie", and two or three other so-called negro songs by the same writer. This man, known in the minstrel profession as "Dan Emmett", caught the true spirit of the African melodies—the lawless, half-mournful, half-exulting songs of the Krumen people. These and the sailor songs could never have been the songs of civilized men ... Undoubtedly many sailor songs have a negro origin. They are the reminiscences of melodies sung by negroes stowing cotton in the holds of ships in Southern ports. The "shanty-men", those hards of the forecastle, have preserved to some extent the meaningless words of negro choruses, and have modified the melodies so as to fit them for salt-water purposes. Certain other songs were unmistakably the work of English sailors of an uncertain but very remote period.Alden, W.L., "Sailors' Songs," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (July 1882) p. 281.
Alden was not writing as a research historian, but rather as an observer of the then-current shanty-singing. His, then, was an impression of shanties based on their style and manner of performance, and he was writing at a time when shanties had yet to become framed by writers and media as belonging to any canon of national "folk music".
An English author of the period, William Clark Russell, expressed his belief in several works that shanties were American in origin.
I think it may be taken that we owe the sailors' working song as we now possess it to the Americans. How far do these songs date back? I doubt if the most ancient amongst them is much older than the century. It is noteworthy that the old voyagers do not hint at the sailors singing out or encouraging their efforts by choruses when at work. In the navy, of course, this sort of song was never permitted. Work proceeded to the strains of a fiddle, to the piping of the boatswain and his mates, or in earlier times yet, to the trumpet. The working song then is peculiar to the Merchant Service, but one may hunt through the old chronicles without encountering a suggestion of its existence prior to American independence and to the establishment of a Yankee marine.Russell, W. Clark, The Romance of Jenny Harlowe, D. Appleton & Co. (1889) p. 838.
As time wore on and shanties were established as an indispensable tool aboard the ships of many nations carrying heterogeneous crew, inspiration from several national and cultural traditions fed into the repertoire and their style was subsequently shaped by countless individuals.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, pp. 19–20. Whatever their fundamental origins, by the late 19th century shanties constituted the heritage of international seamen, with little or no necessary national associations.
Recent research has considered a wider range of 19th century sources than had been possible by 20th-century writers. The evidence from these sources suggests that even in the mid-1830s the genre was still developing, which shifts the period of the rise and flourishing of shanties to a bit later than was previously accepted. The general silence of the historical record on modern shanties until as late as the 1840s,e.g.: Johnson, Theodore T., California and Oregon; or, Sights in the Gold Region, Lippencott, Grambo, and Co. (1851) p. 88. even as shipping shifted to the even faster clipper ships, suggests that they may not have come into widespread use until the middle of the century. They received a boost from the heavy emigrant movement of gold rushes in California and Australia. Popular shanties of the 1850s included "A Hundred Years Ago",Johnson, California and Oregon, p. 88. "One More Day",Whidden, John D., Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days, Little, Brown, and Company (1909) p. 99. "Santiana",Mulford, Prentice, Life by Land and Sea, F. J. Needham (1889) p. 24. "Haul on the Bowline", "Across the Western Ocean",Lowell, "Songs of the Sea," p. 154. and especially "Stormalong".
The "shanty-man"—the chorister of the old packet ship—has left no successors. In the place of a rousing "pulling song", we now hear the rattle of the steam-winch; and the modern windlass worked by steam, or the modern steam-pump, gives us the clatter of cogwheels and the hiss of steam in place of the wild choruses of other days. Singing and steam are irreconcilable. The hoarse steam-whistle is the nearest approach to music that can exist in the hot, greasy atmosphere of the steam-engine.Alden, "Sailors' Songs," p. 281.
Other writers echoed Alden's lament through and after the 1880s; the first collections of shanties appeared in that decade,Luce, Admiral Stephen Bleecker, Naval Songs, Wm. A. Pond & Co. (1883).Davis, J. and Ferris Tozer, Sailor Songs or 'Chanties, Boosey & Co. (1887).Smith, Laura Alexandrine, The Music of the Waters, Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co. (1888). in one sense as a response to what the authors believed was a vanishing art. Shanties continued to be used to some extent so long as were, yet these were comparatively few in the early 20th century.
These early 20th century collectors' choices of what to include, what to exclude, and how to frame the repertoire all had an effect on how following generations have viewed the genre. Because sailors who had sung shanties were by this time very old or dead, and the general public had little opportunity to experience performances of shanties, the representations by these authors were all the more influential in mediating information and creating the impression of "standard" versions of songs.
The English poet John Masefield, following in the footsteps of peers like Rudyard Kipling,Kipling, Rudyard, "The First Chantey" and "The Last Chantey," in The Works of Rudyard Kipling: The Seven Seas, D. Appleton (1899) pp. 18–25. seized upon shanties as a nostalgic literary device, and included them along with much older, non-shanty sea songs in his 1906 collection A Sailor's Garland.Masefield, John, A Sailor's Garland, Methuen & Co. (1906). Although Masefield had sea experience (1891–95), he was not an expert on shanties and the versions he gave of songs cannot be assumed entirely authentic. For example, he admits to never having heard a pumping shanty,Masefield, A Sailor's Garland, p. 300. and yet he goes on to present one without citing its source. In one of his earlier articles,Masefield, John, "Sea-Songs," Temple Bar (Jan. 1906) pp. 56–80. his shanties are set to melodies taken verbatim from Davis and Tozer's earlier work, and he mentions having utilized that and the other widely available collection (L.A. Smith, 1888) as resources. Masefield desired to connect shanties with much older English traditions and literature, and his characterization of individual items as such would prove attractive to later enthusiasts. So for example, Masefield implied that the shanty "A-roving" (which he titled "The Maid of Amsterdam") was derived from Thomas Heywood's The Tragedy of the Rape of Lucrece (1608).Masefield, A Sailor's Garland, p. 302. Lyrics and ideas from Masefield's collection became among the most quoted or plagiarized in later shanty collections,e.g.: Meloney, William Brown, "The Chanty-Man Sings," Everybody's Magazine 33(2) (August 1915) pp. 207–217. and by their sheer ubiquity these contributed to 20th century audiences' perceptions of the genre.
The 1914 collection by Frank Thomas Bullen, Songs of Sea Labour,Bullen, Frank. T. and W.F. Arnold, Songs of Sea Labour, Orpheus Music Publishing (1914). differed from the work of writers such as Masefield in having a more practical, rather than romantic, tone. Bullen, an Englishman, was an experienced shantyman, who sailed during the heyday of shanties to ports in the Southern U.S. and the Caribbean.Bullen and Arnold, Songs of Sea Labour, p. vi. He took a firm stance that only true work songs should be included in his collection, thus resisting the temptation to let shanties slide into the genres of ballads or other off-duty songs. (Pressure of his publisher forced him to include two sea songs, clearly demarcated, at the end of the book.Bullen and Arnold, Songs of Sea Labour, p. vii.) And rather than shape the shanties to appear as narrative pieces, he noted that, since most shanties would usually be improvised, it would be disingenuous to present more than one or two sample verses. As for his framing of the genre's origins, Bullen stated his belief that, "The great majority of these tunes undoubtably emanated from the negroes of the Antilles and the Southern states, a most tuneful race if ever there was one, men moreover who seemed unable to pick up a ropeyarn without a song ..."Bullen and Arnold, Songs of Sea Labour, p. xii. And Bullen's musicologist editor, Arnold, claimed, "The majority of the Chanties are Negroid in origin ..."Bullen and Arnold, Songs of Sea Labour, p. viii. Bullen's insistence on including only true work songs in the collection meant that he likely omitted songs—generally those for heaving tasks, like capstan work—which had been easily borrowed from the land-based traditions of various nations. The effect of including only the most exclusively work-oriented songs meant that a higher percentage of African-American songs were represented. Somewhere between these perspectives was Cecil Sharp's, whose English Folk-Chanteys (1914) was published in the same year, and was based on shanties he collected from aged English sailors in Britain.Sharp, Cecil, English Folk-Chanteys, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. (1914). Sharp responds to Bullen's claims of African-American origins by ceding that many shanties were influenced through the singing of Black shantymenSharp, English Folk-Chanteys, p. xv.—a position that assumes English folk song was the core of the tradition by default. The title of Sharp's work reflects his project of collecting and grouping shanties as part of what he conceived to be a rather continuous English folk song tradition. Sharp states in the introduction that he deliberately excluded shanties which were obviously (i.e. to him) born of popular songs.Sharp, English Folk-Chanteys, p. x. This idea is problematic when one considers that the popular songs that were feeding shanties were largely American and based in real or imagined African-American musical traits. However, Sharp believed that by eliminating such shanties based on popular songs, he could concentrate those that were "folk" songs. Of his own admission, Sharp lacked any shantying or sea experience to intuitively judge shanties like someone such as Bullen, however he offers his objectivity, recording precisely what was sung to him, as consolation. While Sharp's manner of documenting shanties was more or less objective, the field of his research and his biases in what to collect certainly influenced the outcome of this study.Schreffler, "Ethnic Choices," p. 4. And whereas Bullen's work was fairly inaccessible, Sharp was influential as the leader of a cohort of scholars who were actively creating the young field of folk song research.
By the 1920s, the proliferation of shanty collections had begun to facilitate a revival in shanty singing as entertainment for laypersons (see below), which in turn created a market for more shanty collections that were geared towards a general audience. Writers of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, through their derivative, popular works, established in effect a new body of "common knowledge" about shanties that overwrote some of the knowledge of 19th century observers.
In the 1920s, while the proliferation of soft-scholarly books was reifying the shanty repertoire, a few American scholars were audio-recording some of the last surviving sailors that had sung shanties as part of their daily work: in short, field recording. James Madison Carpenter, made hundreds of recordings of shanties from singers in Britain, Ireland, and the north-eastern U.S. in the late 1920s,Walser, Robert Young, "'Here We Come Home in a Leaky Ship!': The Shanty Collection of James Madison Carpenter," Folk Music Journal 7(4) (1998) pp. 471–495. allowing him to make observation from an extensive set of field data.Carpenter, James M., "Chanteys that 'Blow the Man Down,'" New York Times (26 July 1931). Robert Winslow Gordon, founding head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, recorded sailors singing shanties in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1920s, and later made recordings of African-American work songs in Georgia and elsewhere,Rosenberg, Neil V. and Deborah G. Kodish, ed., "Folk-songs of America": The Robert Winslow Gordon Collection, 1922–1932, LP liner notes, Library of Congress (1978). seeking to demonstrate correspondences between these and the shanty genre.Gordon, Robert W., "Folk Songs of America: Work Chanteys," New York Times (16 Jan. 1927). Neither of these scholars had the opportunity, however, to publish major works on shanties. Similarly, Alan Lomax's work starting in the 1930s, especially his field recordings of work songs in the Caribbean and Southern U.S., makes a significant contribution to the information on extant shanty-related traditions.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, Canadian folklorist Helen Creighton collected shanties from Nova Scotia seamen, such as 'Blow the Man Down', 'Whiskey Johnny', 'The Sailor's Alphabet', 'Shenandoah' and Rio Grande. Lastly, William Main Doerflinger carefully recorded and collected shanties from singers in New York and Nova Scotia in the 1930s and 1940s, the result of which was his Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman.Doerflinger, William Main, Shantymen and Shantyboys: Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman, Macmillan (1951; revised 1970).
English folklorist Peter Kennedy recorded Stanley Slade of Bristol, England, thought to be 'The Last Shantyman', singing several shanties including 'Haul Away, Joe', 'Leave Her, Johnny' and 'Oh Shenandoah', and the recordings are available online via the British Library Sound Archive.
With respect to chronological position, while Hugill is affectionately known as "The Last Shantyman", he was also one of the last original shanty collectors.Schreffler, Gibb, "Confronting the Legacy of 'The Last Shantyman': New Media in an Auto-ethnography of Sea Shanty Performance," paper delivered at British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, Liverpool, U.K. (April 2009). A few original collections followed, notably Roger Abrahams'Abrahams, Roger D., Deep The Water, Shallow the Shore, University of Texas Press (1974). and Horace Beck'sBeck, Horace, Folklore and the Sea, Mystic Seaport Museum (1973). works on contemporary shantying in the Caribbean, yet most publications in the "song collection" genre are general anthologies based in Hugill and his predecessors' works. To a great extent, Shanties from the Seven Seas is considered the "last word" on shanties and the first stop as a reference. The book's "authoritative" position is bolstered by the personal image of its author. In contrast to many of the academic folklorists who had collected shanties before him, Hugill possessed the look and pedigree of an old-time sailor, and he was actually able to perform the songs from his collection at sea music festivals. Shanties from the Seven Seas and Stan Hugill's performances have had a tremendous bearing on how shanties have been understood and performed by enthusiasts since the second half of the 20th century up to today.
A few of the editors of early shanty collections provided arrangements for pianoforte accompaniment with their shanties. While this may have simply been a customary way of presenting songs or attempting to frame their tonality, it may also suggest they hoped their examples could be performed, as well. One of the earliest shanty collections, Davis and Tozer's Sailor Songs or 'Chanties' (which circulated in the early 1890s), included such accompaniment, along with safe, "drawing room" style lyrics. It is unknown whether any actual performances were based on this otherwise influential work, however, the proceedings from a meeting of the Manchester Literary Club, 4 February 1895, record an instance of laypersons attempting to recreate shanty performance at that early date.Manchester Literary Club, Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, Vol. 21, John Heywood (1895). In general, shanty performance by laypersons, up through the first two decades of the 20th century, would have been hindered by the lack of suitable resources, if not lack of interest.
Independent of this literature, a revival of sorts was staged by the U.S. Shipping Board in 1918 when Stanton H. King of Boston, a merchant sailor of the 1880s, was appointed as "Official Chantey Man for the American Merchant Marine.""Official Chantey Singer," New York Times (27 Jan. 1918) p. 46. King taught shanties to the young Merchant Marine recruits, but it appears that they were used more for entertainment than work functions. A description of the daily training schedule included the following note:
Recreation includes singing, for each ship is supplied with a piano. The musical program includes old-time chanties, in which the young men are instructed by a veteran deep-water chantie man.Howard, Henry, "Manning the New Merchant Marine," Pacific Marine Review 15 (August 1918).
An on-shore revival in shanty singing for leisure was facilitated by song collections of the 1920s, especially Terry's The Shanty Book (in two volumes, 1921 and 1926). What set apart this and following collections was full musical score along with an adequate stock of lyrics. Collections prior to Terry's (except for Davis and Tozer's much earlier and contrived-sounding settings) had not provided enough verses to create "full" songs, and it is unlikely that performers would venture to improvise new verses in the manner of traditional shantymen. By 1926, it had become a custom at the Seven Seas Club in London to hold a shanty sing-along after the club's monthly dinners."Sea Chanteys Kept Alive. Sailors' Club in London is Collecting and Preserving the Old Songs of Sail," New York Times (7 Nov. 1926). By 1928, commercial recordings of shanties, performed in the manner of classical concert singing, had been released on His Master's Voice, Vocalion, Parlophone, Edison, Aco, and Columbia labels;Lloyd, Llewelyn, "Folk-songs of the Sea: Shanties on the Gramophone," Gramophone (March 1927); The Musical Times (1 April 1928). many were realizations of scores from Terry's collection. Shanties like "Johnny Come Down to Hilo" were more or less standardized through popular dissemination.
The next revival in shanties occurred as part of the Anglophone folk music revival of the mid-20th century. The American folk revival group The Almanac Singers were recruited by Alan Lomax to record several shanties for the 1941 album Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads.Carr, "New Sea Chantey Compilations On Compact Disc." In Britain, the incorporation of shanties into the folk revival repertoire was largely led by A.L. Lloyd starting in the 1950s. An amateur folklorist, Lloyd discarded the earlier classical style of presentations in favor of a more "authentic" performance style. He was generally mysterious about the sources of his shanty arrangements; he obviously referred to collections by editors like Sharp, Colcord, and Doerflinger, however it is often unclear when and whether his versions were based in field experience or his private invention. Lloyd's album The Singing Sailor (1955)Lloyd, A.L. and Ewan MacColl, The Singing Sailor Topic LP (1955). with Ewan MacColl was an early milestone, which made an impression on Stan Hugill when he was preparing his 1961 collection,Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, p. 36. particularly as the performance style it embodied was considered more appropriate than that of earlier commercial recordings. Many other performers followed, creating influential versions and interpretations of shanties that persist today. For example, Lloyd's personal interpretation of "South Australia" was taken up by the Irish folk revival group The Clancy Brothers, from which this version spread to countless folk performers to become established as the "standard" form of what is usually presented as a "traditional" shanty. The Canadian, Alan Mills (1913-1977), recorded numerous songs for Folkways Records including "Songs of the Sea" (1959). Through the mass distribution of particular shanty forms through recordings and clubs, the folk revival has had the effect of creating an impression of rather consistent forms of texts and tunes—a sharp contrast to the highly variable and often improvised nature of work-based shanty singing. Another effect, due to the fact that most folk performers sang shanties along with other genres, is that shanty repertoire was ever more incorporated within the generic fold of "folk song", and their distinctive use, manner of performance, and identity were co-opted.
With one foot firmly planted in the world of traditional shanties, the veteran sailor and author Stan Hugill also became a leader (and follower) of trends in the folk music revival. His presence as an exclusive performer of sailor songs did much to establish sea music as a revival genre apart from or within folk music.Frank, Stuart M., "Stan Hugill 1906–1992: A Remembrance," in Stan Hugill, Shanties From the Seven Seas, abridged edition, Mystic Seaport (1994) p. xx. By the late 1970s, the activities of enthusiasts and scholar-performers at places like the Mystic Seaport Museum (who initiated an annual Sea Music Festival in 1979) and the San Francisco Maritime Museum established sea music—inclusive of shanties, sea songs, and other maritime music—as a genre with its own circuit of festivals, record labels, performance protocol, and so on.
The shantyman was a regular sailor who led the others in singing. He was usually self-appointed.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, pp. 30–31. A sailor would not generally sign on as a shantyman per se, but took on the role in addition to their other tasks on the ship. Nevertheless, sailors reputed to be good shantymen were valued and respected.
The following example, a verse of the shanty "Boney" (in reference to Napoleon), shows the call and response form and the interplay between the voices of the shantyman and the crew.
Shantyman ( solo): Boney was a warrior, All ( refrain): Way-ay- ya, Shantyman ( solo): A reg'lar bull and tarrier, All ( refrain): John Fran çois!As in: Doerflinger, Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman, p. 6.
When working this as a short-drag shanty (see below), hands on the line would synchronize their pulls with the last syllable of each response (in italics).
As a rule, the chantey in its entirety possesses neither rhyme nor reason; nevertheless, it is admirably fitted for sailors' work. Each of these sea-songs has a few stock verses or phrases to begin with, but after these are sung, the soloist must improvise, and it is principally his skill in this direction that marks the successful chantey-man.Whitmarsh, "The Chantey-man," p. 319.
Improvisation and stock verses were the tools of the trade of shantymen. Similar to the blues, shanties often exhibited a string of such verses without much explicit or continuous theme. While on one hand this may simply reflect the aesthetic of the music-culture from which the form originated, this, too, was a feature suited to practical restrictions. Work tasks might be of any length and often unpredictable. Songs with a fixed set of verses, or ballads, which tell a story, were not so well suited to tasks that could end abruptly at any time or that might require extending.
Improvising of lyrics in such a context could be seen as an African-American musical characteristic, as Euro-American observers of Black work-singing consistently remarked on its extempore nature.For just a few examples, see: British Naval Officer, Service Afloat, p. 259; Brown, David, The Planter; or, Thirteen Years in the South, H. Hooker (1853) p. 85; Gosse, Philip Henry, Letters from Alabama, Morgan and Chase (1859) p. 305. Stock verses helped the shantyman fill space when his creative faculties came up short. These might take the form of multipurpose clichés, like,
Up aloft this yard must go. refrain Up aloft from down below.This couplet is documented in many sources; here it is drawn from: Whitmarsh, "The Chantey-man," p. 321. refrain
Or, the shantyman may use formulas, like "Were you ever in blank?", for example,
Were you ever down in Mobile Bay? refrain A-screwing cotton by the day?Whidden, Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days, p. 99. refrain
(The refrain in these cases may be any; that is, the stock verses may be fitted to any of a number of shanties having a similar tune-chorus form.)
Many stock verses used phrases that "floated" between both minstrel and authentic African-American traditional songs. For example, the phrase "girl with the blue dress on" is documented in a Black muledriver's songScarborough, Dorothy and Ola Lee Gulledge, On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs, Harvard University Press (1925) p. 231. and in a popular minstrel song,Christy, Charles and George White, Christy's and White's Ethiopian Melodies, T. B. Peterson (1855) p. 65. as well as in a few shanties, for example,
O wake her, O shake her, O shake that girl with the blue dress on, O Johnny come to Hilo; Poor old man.Sharp, English Folk-Chanteys, p. 19.
As evident from the last lyric, above, shanty lyrics were not limited to seafaring or work topics. Drawing lyrics (and sometimes entire songs) from the popular and traditional repertoires of the time meant that a wide range of themes were represented.
On vessels of war, the drum and fife or boatswain's whistle furnish the necessary movement regulator. There, where the strength of one or two hundred men can be applied to one and the same effort, the labor is not intermittent, but continuous. The men form on either side of the rope to be hauled, and walk away with it like firemen marching with their engine. When the headmost pair bring up at the stern or bow, they part, and the two streams flow back to the starting-point, outside the following files. Thus in this perpetual "follow-my-leader" way the work is done, with more precision and steadiness than in the merchant-service."Songs of the Sea," Atlantic Monthly 2(9) (July 1858).As this maneuver could only be used on ships with large crews, such as vessels of war—in which few shanties were sung—shanties to accompany it were few in number and were not often noted in context. The most commonly cited example is "Drunken Sailor", which is thought to be one of the few shanties allowed in the Royal Navy.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, pp. 134–5.
The above categories, with respect to the repertoire they contain, are not absolute. Sailors often took a song from one category and, with necessary alterations to the rhythm, tempo, or form, used it for a different task. This can be seen in the frequent lack of consensus, among different writers and informants, as to what job a given shanty was used for.
Examples of sea songs include "Spanish Ladies",Marryat, Capt. Frederick, Poor Jack, Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, (1840) p. 116. first popular in the Royal Navy,"The Man-of-War's Man," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 11(60) (Jan. 1822) p. 22. and "The Stately Southerner", a ballad about a U.S. war ship.e.g.: Williams, "The Sailors' 'Chanties'."; Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy and Mary Winslow Smyth, Minstrelsy of Maine: Folk-songs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast, Houghton Mifflin (1927). Examples of sea songs that were poorly documented in the sailing era, but which gained great popularity among singers in the revival era, are "The Leaving of Liverpool" and "Rolling Down to Old Maui".
There are notable bodies of shanty repertoire in Swedish language, Norwegian, Dutch language, French language, Breton language, and Welsh language, and shanties have been translated into Polish language and German language. The terms for shanties in these languages do not always precisely correlate with English usage. In French, chant de marin or "sailor's song" is a broad category that includes both work and leisure songs. Swedish uses sjömansvisa, "sailor song", as a broad category, but tends to use the borrowed "shanty" to denote a work song. Similarly, Norwegian uses sjømannsvise as the broad category and the borrowed term sjanti (also spelled "shanty") or the native oppsang for work songs. The equivalents in German are Seemannslied and, again, shanty. Polish uses a word derived from English: szanta.
Substantial collections of non-English shanties include the following, which have been instrumental in forming the modern day sailor song repertoires of revival performers in their respective languages:
Annual maritime festivals in coastal towns provide a gathering point for both amateurs and professionals, and the site for the introduction of new interpretations.
Performers who favor a "traditional" style do not necessarily believe they are replicating the exact style of shanty singing of the 19th century. However, within the constraints of modern contexts, they tend to adhere to certain stylistic traits that are believed to have characterized the genre historically. These may include a loud or full voice, an emphatic, strident—even harsh—tone (as if to carry over the noise of wind and waves), and tempos and rhythms that are reasonably conducive to working. They often perform a capella or only with light instrumentation typical of sailors (e.g. concertina). In general, performances may be more "rough around the edges" and be of variable length to accommodate impromptu changes in verses.
A great many of the performers of shanties do so in what might be distinguished as a "folk music" style. They tend to be more interested in the songs themselves and less in the "shanty style" of performance, in favor of music that may be considered more pleasant, less rough, and with more variation and interest than traditional shanties offer. Stylistic characteristics include lighter vocals with a "folk" timbre, livelier tempos, and instrumental interludes between verses. Invariably these performers choose to accompany themselves on instruments such as guitar and banjo. Their rhythms may be syncopated and quite different from work song rhythms, relying on the instruments to keep time rather than the voice.
Still other performers come to shanties from backgrounds in pop, rock, or theatrical music, and perform in what may be called a "contemporary" style. Some of the preferred characteristics are smooth, pop-style vocal timbre, carefully worked out harmony, and engaging rhythms.
Less commonly—though it was the case with their earliest commercial recordings—shanties are performed in a "classical" choir style. Choirs like the Robert Shaw Chorale, Sea Shanties, Living Stereo (1961) the Norman Luboff Choir, Songs of the Sea, Columbia (1956) and The Seafarers Chorus We Sing of the Sea, Elektra (1960) have released entire albums of shanties and sea songs.
I soon got used to this singing; for the sailors never touched a rope without it. Sometimes, when no one happened to strike up, and the pulling, whatever it might be, did not seem to be getting forward very well, the mate would always say, "Come, men, can't any of you sing? Sing now, and raise the dead." And then some one of them would begin, and if every man's arms were as much relieved as mine by the song, and he could pull as much better as I did, with such a cheering accompaniment, I am sure the song was well worth the breath expended on it. It is a great thing in a sailor to know how to sing well, for he gets a great name by it from the officers, and a good deal of popularity among his shipmates. Some sea-captains, before shipping a man, always ask him whether he can sing out at a rope.Melville, Herman, Redburn: His First Voyage, Harper & Bros. (1850) pp. 63–4.
The shanty genre was unfamiliar to much of the lay public until it was publicized in the 1880s, however, so most of the popular references in fiction do not begin until that decade. A well-known early example, though not strictly speaking a reference to a shanty, is the song "Fifteen Men", which was invented by Robert Louis Stevenson for his novel Treasure Island (1883).Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island, Roberts Brothers (1883). Quotes of "Blow the Man Down" were particularly plentiful.e.g.: Hains, T. Jenkins, The Wind-jammers, J.B. Lippincott (1899) p. 145; Rideout, Henry Milner, "Wild Justice," The Atlantic Monthly 92(552) (Oct. 1903) p. 500. Rudyard Kipling romanticized the idea of the sailor's sea song within the poetic genre with his works "The First Chantey" and "The Last Chantey" (1893).
English composer Michael Maybrick (alias Stephen Adams) sold a hundred thousand copies of an 1876 song Nancy Lee in Seafaring style, with lyrics by Frederick Weatherly concerning an archetypal sailors wife. The song evoked an 1882 response Susie Bell from Australian composer Frederick Augustus Packer in the far flung British colony at Port Arthur, South Australia.
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