Sing a Shanty with Me

Touching Hearts Across Time

It all started with Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag[1] in 2013, or so I remember. I didn’t play it, but it was set in the Golden Age of Piracy, with the titular Assassin, Edward Kenway, being one of those pirates. Of course, being on pirate ships for long periods of time, the developers took the time to implement an ancient defense against boredom and flagging spirits on a ship – the sea shanty[2]. Sea shanties are simple, rhythmic work songs that make sure that everyone’s on the same page, doing everything at the same time, and to stave off the endless boredom of being at sea – remember, these trips used to take weeks, if not months. Crews would sing these together while doing backbreaking labor like lifting cargo, tying down the sails, and swabbing the deck – something to push them through the necessary drudgery that keeps the ship ship-shape. They had nothing but each other, and shanties were a tool that helped bind them together to face the world. It’s a beautiful thing – something I didn’t have any idea of when I first discovered folk music and sea shanties back in high school (2013-2014).

This is the story of how the other half of my music taste evolved, and it all started with Drunken Sailor.

Drunken Sailor

What do we do with a drunken sailor?

What do we do with a drunken sailor?

What do we do with a drunken sailor?

Early in the mornin’?

Back in those days, our school made laptops mandatory for us – white MacBooks that we all had in order to help with our schoolwork and push us into the world of digital learning. If anyone remembers Edmodo[3], we used that or our school’s own E-Learning Forum/Platform. The school generously provided Wi-Fi and charging points for us, putting a tremendous amount of faith in a bunch of teenaged boys.

Naturally, we played games on them (Call of Duty 4, Warcraft 3, and Asphalt being favorites), watched movies and anime, binge YouTube in class on the sly, and generally did everything possible to not use our laptops for the intended purpose. By next year, they switched out the laptops for iPads, in a vain attempt to curb our enthusiasm by making our goofing off “obvious”. Not that that ever really stopped us.

In any case, I loved listening to music on YouTube. Longtime readers will know I’m a bit of an old-school rocker or metalhead – AC/DC, Metallica, Guns & Roses, Dire Straits, and many similar groups are among my favorites. Thanks to shanties trending at the time, I listened to Drunken Sailor and loved it. Upbeat rhythm, repetitive, easy-to-remember lyrics, and whimsical – if not happy because of the many punishments doled out to the drunken sailor, including being put in bed with the captain’s daughter (code for a whipping with a cat o’ nine tails) combine to make it a fun listen.[4] From there, I discovered the folk group the Irish Rovers and their other songs – Orange and the Green, Black Velvet Band, and Whiskey in the Jar[5] being three of my favorites. The mischief, whimsy, and black humor of the stereotype of the drunken Irish rake was just good fun – though there were more serious songs like Come Out Ye Black and Tans and Eileen Og, the former a revolutionary song of the Troubles, the latter an ancient redpill. It was like discovering a whole new world of music, and with how old everyone in the space seemed to be, and how ancient the songs are, it seemed to me like discovering an old, dusty archive of music – old vinyl records tucked away in phonographs, or songs you’d only hear when the senior citizens gather round to reminisce.

Of course, this foray into folk music had the YouTube algorithm serving me all sorts of good stuff, leading me to the group that would combine my new folk love with my rocker roots – The Dreadnoughts.

The Dreadnoughts[6]

Rolling down to Old Maui, me boys!

Rolling down to Old Maui!

We’re homeward bound from the Arctic route

Rolling down to Old Maui!

The Dreadnoughts are a Canadian folk punk band that takes a lot of inspiration from sea shanties and older artists like the late Stan Rogers, to whom they have a great tribute song – Dear Old Stan. The Dreadnoughts’ songs are a good mix of happy-go-lucky shanties like Randy-Dandy-Oh, historical originals showing off more punk like Roll Northumbria, or the very boppy Sleep is for the Weak. Every album nicely balances slower serious songs like Roll Northumbria and Dear Old Stan with high-energy tracks like Randy-Dandy-Oh and Sleep is for the Weak. These guys were part of my college soundtrack, getting me through plenty of homework or working on studying for tests – the mix of high energy and more relaxed tracks giving my work a natural rhythm.

I love the Dreadnoughts because they found a way to bring old songs, dusty records, and old-school themes to the modern world. Electric guitars and bass complement harmonized vocals in singing both old shanties with simple lyrics and newer original songs with more complex lyrics and rhythms. This fusion is best shown in their song Lifeboat Man – a quick, 90-second original composition set to a simple beat, with modern lyrics about a woman throwing herself into the water to be “rescued” by the lifeboat men, if you catch her meaning. The lyrics and themes are distinctly modern, but the sense of humor and the song wouldn’t be out of place in those days – boys will be boys, particularly when a damsel in “distress” is involved.

Naturally, the success of sea shanties and The Dreadnoughts spawned covers – plenty of artists put their own spin on others’ songs.

The Covers

Yo-ho, all hands!

Hoist the colors high!

Heave-ho, thieves and beggars!

Never shall we die!

Covering another artist’s songs has a lot of benefits; practicing techniques and adding one’s own style, for fun, and appearing on searches for the original song and getting exposure. Usually, these artists re-imagine others’ songs in their own style – after all, if you already know how to sing a particular way, turning other songs into that is pretty cool, right? These genre-switching covers exist for any genre you can think of – Turbo and Vikas turn everything into adrenaline-pumping, high-BPM Eurobeat[7], Jonathan Young and PelleK convert Disney hits and anime openings into metal albums, and Colm McGuinness turns everything Irish via accent. Jonathan and Colm in particular cover sea shanties together – Santiana, Hoist the Colors (from Pirates of the Caribbean), and Northwest Passage (from The Dreadnoughts and Stan Rogers) are all songs I like to come back to.

What’s interesting, however, is that all of the songs I just mentioned are a year old or less (Santiana coming out in May of 2022), almost a decade after Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag came out and put sea shanties on the Internet’s radar. These still get hundreds of thousands to millions of views[8] – showing that sea shanties have some lasting appeal, rather than just being a sudden wave or fad, destined to disappear into the murky collective memory of the Internet. I think so, at least, and to find it, we’ll have to go look at some classics – people who were on the train before it blew up. Farther back than The Dreadnoughts, even, to people who were doing this long before it all blew up.

Roll the Old Chariot

Oh, we’d be all right if the wind was in our sails!

We’d be alright, if the wind was in our sails!

Oh, we’d be all right if the wind was in our sails!

And we’ll all hang on behind!

If you watch one video of all the ones I’ve linked so far, watch this one. Meet David Coffin, a man already middle-aged in 2010, when this video was taken, long before most of the Internet knew what a sea shanty was. The video is of him singing an “Roll the Old Chariot”, or “A Drop of Nelson’s Blood”, dating back to the 1800’s, at the Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival. The festival is an effort by the city of Portsmouth to preserve the city’s history and tradition as, well, a port, meaning plenty of sailors and plenty of sea shanties on the rolling blue.

In the video, David Coffin walks in front of the other people here – probably former sailors or families of sailors in their own right, all living in a sailing city, and leads them. He doesn’t sing, or perform at them, he leads them – expecting them to sing along with him, and boy do they do. Of course, barrel-chested David leads them, but everyone knows the words and the music, and is happily singing along. This isn’t his concert, this is their concert.

There, I think, lies the enduring appeal of the sea shanty. Like a low-tech version K-pop choreographies or independent rappers, shanties are easy to learn and simple to get into – like getting into rap, all you need is your voice. The key, though, is that there is no performer – only a leader. The whole point is for the people to sing together, synchronized, as though all working together towards a single goal – to keep the ship sailing, despite any force of man or nature that will come against it. No worrying about if this is based or cringe, no worrying about the sustainability or financial impact, no worrying about why we do what we do – because if the sea takes us, we’re all going to drown!

That feeling of togetherness, of “us against the world, no matter what”, is so rare these days that we have to go out and sing ancient songs to get it. That feeling of affiliation, of togetherness, of knowing your place and purpose and wanting to fulfill it – that is the hole in our collective heart that shanties want to fill.

Now that I think about it, everything seems to want to fill this hole these days. Politics are all about devotion to a cause or policy – us versus them for all the marbles[9]. Advertising and marketing want to turn you into a consumer advocate, rather than simply selling you the product and be done with it[10]. The rising popularity of parasocial relationships[11] – the feeling of being friends with a social media personality who you know through their content but knows nothing about you – that’s just wanting to belong in a group with them and their other followers, having someone, somewhere to cling to as a “ride or die”[12].

Any port in a storm[13] - and since life now seems to be nothing but storms, we’re all scrambling for ports! There are those of us who return to the old, safe harbors of family and friends - those of us who are at sea and must shelter in the massive container ports of profession or politics - and those of us who seek refuge in the free ports of social media and online chat groups or gaming communities. No matter where you end up, you’d better make friends or mend fences, or risk being cast out of port and back into the storm.

Next time you feel healthy, happy, and safe, look around you, see the people who share a port with you in the storm, and cherish them.

Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her

I thought I heard the old man say:

Leave her, Johnny, leave her!

Tomorrow ye will get your pay,

And it’s time for us to leave her!

“Leave her, Johnny, leave her” is a somber shanty about arriving at port and leaving the ship, perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever, saved for the last shift on the ship before the next voyage. The Longest Johns virtual sing-along cover precisely proves my point, with over 500 people sending in video clips.

I thought it was fitting to sea this piece out.

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[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/242050/Assassins_Creed_IV_Black_Flag/

[2]

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmodo

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_Sailor

[5] There’s a Metallica cover of this too, which I love. Distorted electric guitars going over the Cork and Kerry mountains is pretty cool.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreadnoughts

[7] Specifically, high-energy Italo Disco made for Japanese people. How that got popular deserves its own essay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurobeat#Italy_and_Japan

[8] At least ten thousand of which are me, loljk.

[9]

Power and Influence

[10]

The World of Glass

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

[12] https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/ride-or-die/

[13] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/any-port-in-a-storm