Shed No Tear

The last time Canada’s team won gold at the International Ice Hockey Federation World Junior Championship, the foot-stomping Halifax crowd greeted each goal with the rollicking chant, “Heave away, me jollies, heave away!” The traditional sea shanty by Newfoundland band the Fables was chosen as Team Canada’s goal tune for the 2023 tournament and proved wildly popular. The phenomenon reflected a worldwide resurgence of humble seafaring songs — and Canada’s role in keeping them alive.

The COVID-19 pandemic likely contributed to the craze. As people were sequestered in their homes, songs of adventure on the high seas sung in unison offered a glimpse of hope and community.

Sea shanties (or chanties) originated as songs to accompany rhythmic labour on ships and boats. Other sea songs, such as ballads, express shared emotion, especially grief, according to Heather Sparling, Canada Research Chair in Musical Traditions and a professor of ethnomusicology at Cape Breton University. Her research focuses on songs about disasters, especially shipwrecks.

In maritime communities, ships sometimes go missing without a trace. “It would take a while for people to realize that something had gone wrong,” she said. “You can’t go to the place where the ship went down and lay a flower…. Writing [songs] becomes one possible way of, sort of, processing that grief.”

The tradition continues today. After five young fishermen perished in a storm off the coast of southwestern Nova Scotia in 2013, Sparling found at least eleven songs written about the tragedy.

Some scholars believe shanties originated in the American South in the early 1800s. “Shantying basically starts in the cotton industry,” said University of Kentucky associate professor of ethnomusicology James Revell Carr. “The earliest songs in this repertoire were sung initially by Black stevedores, people who were loading cotton onto ships.”

The dock workers were likely drawing inspiration from a pre-existing genre of Black slave work songs, he said. Singing made hard work easier, and the songs quickly spread throughout the maritime trade routes of the world, including to the whaling ships of the North.

Whatever the origins of sea shanties, Dagher believes Canadians have played a vital role in keeping them alive. For example, he said, the modern version of the shanty “Randy Dandy O” — which recounts the preparations of sailors heading for Cape Horn — was arranged in Nova Scotia before being covered by artists such as the Dreadnoughts and Bristol, U.K., folk group the Longest Johns.

The sea shanty tradition has now become an undeniable part of Canadian culture, said Dagher. “I think the Maritimes and Newfoundland are a sort of portal where many Canadians say, ‘Well, this is part of Canada, [so] I am allowed to feel that this is a little bit my music.’”