The viral success of Glasgow Postie called Nathan Evans and his Sea Shanties was another surprising twist to lockdown life. The original video has been viewed over 6m times on TikTok alone and inspired a flurry of community spirit - with other social media users adding harmonies, instrumentation, and remixing it with dubstep, drum and bass, funk and metal. Ronan Keating and Gary Barlow even did their own version. But there is more to Sea Shanties than meets the eye.
The Sea Shanty, whose name is proposed to come from the french “chanter” - to sing - first gained recognition in society in the 18th Century, although it is thought the genre could predate records by hundreds of years. No one knows their exact origin but Sea Shanties are believed to be both inspired by British Folk and the African American work songs sung by slaves. Before most of us worked alone at a desk and could just pop on our headphones and listen to our motivational music of choice, a massive proportion of the population worked in heavy team-based physical labour. Working songs were used to motivate and coordinate these tasks. Merchant sailors and nautical workers were no exception.
Percy Lionel Smythe, 1874 (BHC4163, © National Maritime Museum)
To understand the genre, we need to understand the conditions from which it was born. A merchant sailor’s life was dangerous and gruelling. Seamen lived in cramped conditions close to disease-carrying rats, had low pay, worked in bad weather so were often cold and wet, and often had a poor diet which caused malnutrition and scurvy – caused by a lack of vitamin C. Many sailors had signed up for the job because of poverty without even seeing the boat. At the time, sailors who refused to board could be imprisoned with 12 weeks of hard labour in jail. This fact illustrates how bad the conditions were. In the 1850s, a prison-inspector reported that 3/4 of jailed prisoners in the South-West of England were seamen who refused to sail on unseaworthy, dangerous or inadequately manned vessels. People chose hard labour in jail rather than working on a ship.
Even on well-run ships, mistakes could cost the whole crew their lives, so ship’s officers maintained strict discipline on board, and we aren’t talking about a good talking to. Punishments included being ‘tarred and feathered’. Yes, that means pouring (sometimes hot) wood tar over a person then either throwing feathers over them or forcing them to roll in them. Or being ‘keel-hauled’, a punishment which would at best permanently maim. This was enforced by tieing victims to a rope, swinging them overboard and dragging them around behind or underneath the ship. Flogging was the most common punishment, with either a knotted rope or if you were unlucky a ‘cat o’ nine tail’ which was a sort of whip made of nine knotted cotton ropes. And, of course, a seaman found guilty of mutiny would be hanged.
But, amongst all this horror, where does the Sea Shanty come in? They were vital in coordinating tasks as well as promoting team spirit, keeping morale high and helping seamen express and process the emotional impact of their gruelling lifestyle. For the ship’s officers, this would mean a reduction of mistakes, mutiny and therefore punishments.
But what makes up a Sea Shanty, and how does it work?
The key to the Sea Shanty is rhythm. Sea Shanties had different rhythms for different tasks, for example, the capstan shanties. The capstan was the machine that brought up the anchor - wooden poles were attached to a central axle and sailors would push them in a smooth circular motion, so a smoother, more lyrical song was needed. The most famous shanty “Drunken Sailor”, was a short-haul Shanty. Designed for tasks requiring quick pulls over a relatively short time, it had a particular structure with 4 pulls per verse.
In Scotland, the 18th Century “dreg song” from the Firth of Forth (A Scottish Estuary) was used on three-man boats that collected oysters by dredging. Two men would row and another would operate the dredge, which was an iron frame with a net attached that was dragged along the seafloor. To work effectively, the boat had to maintain a constant speed, too fast and the dredge would bounce and lift off the bottom and too slow the nets wouldn’t open fully. To keep this constant speed, fisherman developed a song with an asymmetric rhythm. The dredge operator would sing a 5 syllable call, matching the effort it took to the oars to be pulled through the water. The rowers would respond with a three-syllable phrase, matching the effort it would take to bring the oars round in the air. This was so effective at scraping oysters from the seafloor that fishermen believed the songs would charm the oysters from their beds. The first dregs would collect 30m oysters a year at the start of the 18th Century. Side note - this was actually pretty short-sighted and soon decimated the oyster population. The annual catch fell to 9m by 1867 and then to 60,000 in 1877. The dredging industry slowly declined and died, and in 1957 the oyster population was declared extinct in the Firth of Forth. Perhaps the dreg song worked too well!
There are some other features of Sea Shanties that Some other features of the Sea Shanty are interesting because they might point to why they have become popular on social media. Like much of the social media content we consume, a shanty is a quick, concise format to share a story. They follow the form of a classic earworm, I did a more in-depth video on this which I will link in at the end. But in short, they are traditionally designed to be simple songs with a strong rhythm, which makes them catchy and memorable. And it’s not just simplicity that makes it catchy. They are also really easy to sing, spanning a small vocal range and focusing on rhythm, meaning you don’t have to be a great singer to make it sound good. This feature also makes it easy to remix with different genres, fueling the creativity that has unfolded around this revival. And during this hugely isolating time for people, perhaps it’s not surprising to have a resurgence in community song. Shanties tell stories of people working together through adversity. In fact, the song that inspired the viral craze “Soon May the Wellerman Come” speaks of richer better days ahead. Of course, we are facing different challenges today compared to the 18th century but the sentiment still rings true as many of us are hoping for better days ahead after the pandemic.
However, it seems this song has a dark history as well. In the early 19th Century, brothers Edward, George and Joseph Weller owned a New Zealand whaling station. Their employees were known as “Wellermen”. Although most would call The Wellerman Song a Shanty because of it’s Shanty rhythm - it is actually technically a cutting-in song, a cousin of the Shanty. The cutting-in song is a working song that helped nautical workers get through yet another undesirable task. Mostly sung on land, the cutting song was designed to accompany the whale’s slaughter, stripping the whale carcass and boiling the blubber. Although foul-smelling, whale oil was used in soap, mechanical lubricant and candles at the time and was very valuable. Ambergris - a grey waxy substance formed from a secretion of the bile duct in the intestines of the whale was sold as a fixative in perfume. Whalebone was a sturdy but flexible material that could be used in brushes, corsets and umbrellas. From 1833, the Weller Brothers began using ships to sell provisions to whalers at sea. The song’s lyrics tell of how the crew hope for the Wellerman to come, “to bring us sugar and tea and rum.” According to the New Zealand Folk Song website, the workers were not paid monetary wages, they were paid in clothing, rum and tobacco. The working conditions were poor. In the song, the lyrics tell us how the workers are hoping one day to “take our leave and go”. The Wellers also expanded into a diverse array of industries like timber, potatoes, dried fish, Maori artefacts, and even the preserved heads of tattooed Maori people. Yes you heard that right. Preserving heads as death rite was a normal tradition for high ranking Maoris however the trade got a little more grizzly in the 19th Century, with the demand for these heads becoming high the Wellermen helped make “heads-to-order” by tattooing and killing slaves.
Although the Weller business was successful, the collapse of the local area's whale population, led the Wellermen to declare bankruptcy after only 10 years in business.
But there is a nicer point to take away. Over a decade ago oysters were once again discovered in the Firth of Forth, and in 2020 it was reported whale populations are making an astonishing come back around the world. Perhaps this is the final reason Sea Shanties have become so popular, they remind us that although times have been tough, we can heal and recover.
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Resources
History of Sea Shanties: https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/a-brief-history-of-sea-shanties/
Sea Shanties: https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Sea-Shanties/
Life at Sea: https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/life-sea-age-sail
Life in the merchant service: https://dawlishchronicles.com/life-at-sea-in-merchant-service-in-the-1870s/
Harsh History of Sea Shanties: https://mashable.com/article/wellerman-sea-shanty-history/?europe=true
