Sea Shanties Transcript

Kate Jaimet: Welcome to Stories Behind the History. I'm Kate Jaimet, senior editor of Canada's History magazine. In this podcast, I speak with leading historians and witnesses to history to discover the people and events that shaped our nation.

Today, I'm passing the microphone to our contributor, Jonah Grignon, for a special episode on sea shanties. These catchy maritime tunes are not only part of Canada's folk repertoire. They're truly an example of world music. So sit back. Let the wind ruffle your hair and discover the curious origins of sea shanties.

01:15

Jonah Grignon: Back in 2022, when Team Canada was playing in the World Juniors Hockey tournament, they had the most interesting goal celebration song.

["Heave away" by The Fables] ♪ Heave away me jollies, Heave away ♪

Jonah: The whole crowd would get up and sing along to Heave Away by The Fables.

It may seem like a strange choice compared to any of the standard arena rock rotation that We Will Rock You, Seven Nation Army, those ones. But culturally speaking, the tune was pretty close to home.

The World Juniors tournament was hosted between cities in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia right in the heart of the Atlantic region, which birthed some of Canada's most legendary folk music. It also wasn't the first time in recent memory that the public had been exposed to Sea Shanties.

Back in 2021, at the height of the COVID 19 lock-downs, shanties had a bit of a moment on TikTok, a rendition of the wailing song Wellerman by Scottish postman Nathan Evans went viral. As of spring 2020 for the original video was at 2.5 million likes on TikTok. The version Evans posted to YouTube has over 324 million views.

Now the viral popularity of Sea Shanties may prove to just be another short lived social media trend. Many would likely say that the fad has already come and gone and faded into digital memory. But in Atlantic Canada, Sea Shanties were never just a trend to be chased. The relationship to the folk genre goes far, far back and will likely extend well beyond any short lived love on social media.

03:10

♪ Old Sally Brown. I love your daughter. Way, hi, roll and go. For her I sail up on the water. Spend my money on Sally Brown. For seven long years I courted Sally. Way, hi, roll and go. Hold me boy and dilly dally. Spend my money on Sally Brown For seven long years we would not marry. ♪

Jonah: First things first. If you want to get technical and we do kind of have to, Heave Away isn't a shanty at all. Neither is Wellerman. Sea Shanties have very practical origins and definitions.

On ship's a shantyman would call out lines ,usually improvised, and the crew would respond with a chorus, which was usually something easy to remember, like this...

♪ Roll the pile down, Ho! Rollin’! Rollin’! Rollin’! Rollin’! Rollin’ the whole world round! That fine gal of mine’s on the Georgia line! And we’ll roll the woodpile down! ♪

Jonah: This created a rhythm which would help with tasks like lifting the anchor or pulling tacks from sheets. Today, it probably goes without saying that shanties aren't really a necessary work tool in the Maritime world. Still, the spirit has endured. And on the East Coast shanties and other music, like folk ballads, are a connection to tradition.

Dr. Heather Sparling is a Canada research chair on ethnomusicology. She's also an associate professor at Cape Breton University.

04:42

Dr. Heather Sparling: My research is on Disaster Songs of Atlantic Canada, and I have collected more than 500 songs written about a number of Atlantic Canadian disasters, many of which the majority of which I would say are related in some way to marine disasters.

Jonah: According to Sparling, the news of shipwrecks could often take a long time to reach the shore. In many cases, news about loved ones at sea just wouldn't come at all. So family members would have to do some inferring. Fill in the blanks on their own. And as Sparling put it, it's not like you could just go to the site of a shipwreck and lay a wreath like you could with a normal grave on land, especially not when you weren't certain the shipwreck happened at all.

Dr. Sparling: You know, how do we make sense of these tragedies which kill many people at one time and often don't forget to. The other issue with Maritime disasters is that, especially in the past, news of that event may take a long time to make it back to the communities of the people who were involved in those disasters because the ship might just disappear. Right. And so it would take a while for people to realize that something had gone wrong.

Jonah: So people would turn to different ways of processing their grief. Ways like writing songs. And the thing is, this still happens.

Dr. Sparling said she's collected eleven disaster songs about a fishing boat that went missing in 2013. There are even disaster songs about the 2018 Humboldt Broncos bus crash.

Ballads and shanties endure in Canada, and not just as expressions of grief. In January of 2023, striking workers at Memorial University in St. John’s used sea shanties as protest songs.

Quietly, but consistently, shanties and folk ballads have remained a part of Canadian culture, especially on the East Coast, where some of the most legendary folk music was born. As part of the ongoing attempts to carve out a distinct identity while in the Shadow of the U.S.A.

And as an example, look no further than one of the most iconic, definitive Canadian folk songs ever Stan Rogers Barrett's Privateers. If you don't know the song, you probably do. But on the off chance, Barrett's Privateers was released in 1976, it tells the story of a jaded sailor who lost his legs on a voyage after his ship was set upon by a larger, much better outfitted American vessel.

It's become an icon of Canadian music culture and an example of how Canadian musicians have kept the tradition of sea shanties alive. After all, it is a sea shanty to the core. The call response chorus format is authentic to the work songs of old. Listening to it, it's hard to believe it only predates Luke Skywalker's existence by one single year.

Since Roger's death in 1983, plenty of Canadian musicians have carried on this legacy. The Real Mackenzies, Great Big Sea, the Dreadnoughts, the list goes on.

But of course, there's nothing inherently Canadian about sea shanties. They don't belong to Canada any more than they do to Australia or South Africa or the United Kingdom.

Sean Dahger is a Montreal folk musician. He's likely best known for his work on the soundtrack of the video game Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, which introduced shanties to a younger generation in 2013.

He said people will often ask him where the shanties he sings come from, and that's a bit of a misleading question.

08:35

Sean Dahger: People ask me a lot where does the song come from, or where does that come from? And my answer is, the songs, they come from everywhere. You can classify the songs by the language they're sung in. And you can't say that this song is American or this song is English or something because, you know, the song is where the sailors went. And they come from everywhere the sailors went.

Jonah: You can't classify them by any nationality or region because the songs just went where the sailors went. Crews that sang them could have been made up of men from all corners of the globe. But that leaves the question who's been left behind in the true history of sea shanties?

♪ Fire Marengo, fire away. Screw him in and there he’ll stay. Fire Marengo, fire away. Now stow him in his hole below. Fire Marengo, fire away. Stay he must and then he’ll go. ♪

Dr. James Revell Carr: I'm an associate professor of ethnomusicology at University of Kentucky, and I run a center here called the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music.

Jonah: That's Dr. James Revell Carr. He's one of the leading authorities on sea shanties in the U.S.A.

Dr. Carr: I kind of started out very early in life, working at Maritime Museum in Connecticut where I grew up. And so working there, it's a museum with a collection of historic ships and it's one of the places where this sort of folk music revival of sea shanties was happening back in the seventies and eighties.

And so I was, you know, kind of around for that. I kind of grew up around people singing sea shanties, you know, primarily in this kind of educational context.

Jonah: Some of his research has focused on the origins of shanties, and though many of the versions we now know make mention of Boston, Liverpool, New York, San Malo. The first shanties likely weren't American or Eurocentric at all.

Dr. Carr: In grad school, I decided to write my dissertation on a musical interaction between sailors and Pacific Islanders in the 19th century that eventually turned into my first book, which is called Hawaiian Music in Motion.

For that book, I took the work I had done on the larger Pacific and focused it down into musical interactions between sailors and native Hawaiians specifically, and looked at the history of Hawaiian sailing aboard American sailing ships and making music.

And in fact, one of the very earliest accounts of sea shanties being sung in American literature is in the book Two Years Before the Mast. And it describes some ships on the coast of California in the fur trade. And there are shanties being sung by native Hawaiian singers. So it's a really interesting you know, example of, you know, one of the earliest accounts of sea shanties. And it's not people from America, you know, it's not American sailors, it's not British sailors singing the shanties.

12:04

[Music plays]

Jonah: The cultural makeup of the ships on which shanties were being sung could be very diverse.

Dr. Carr: It depends on which sailing vessels you're talking about. One of my primary interests is whaling ships. And so whaling ships, because of the extreme length of their voyages, the typical voyage was, you know, three years or as long as five to even six or seven years by necessity. Whaling ships frequently would, you know, lose crewmen in various ports and then take on new seamen, too, to work aboard the ship wherever they were.

So whaling ships were kind of notoriously multicultural. And there would be, first of all, a lot of black American seamen aboard whaling ships. Also, what they called black Portuguese, there would be South American seamen, Pacific Islander seamen, seamen from the West coast of Africa, seamen from, you know, Indonesia, even occasionally Japanese. So there were, you know, lots of, you know, a variety of cultures represented aboard these ships.

Jonah: Naturally, with all of these cultures present, there would be some cultural exchange. This often included music and sailors from all corners of the world would bring their traditions onto the ships with them.

Dr. Carr: I think one area certainly that influenced sailors, you know, that something that came from the Azores would have been musical instruments like the guitar and particularly what came to be known as the ukulele in Hawaii was originally a Azorian instrument called the Machete that became popular with sailors because it was a very small, you know, instrument that they could carry with them on the ship.

So Azorian sailors brought that instrument to Hawaii and then Hawaiian, it caught on as as a popular thing in Hawaii.

So, you know, that's one really easily traceable musical influence that came from the Azores.

14:31

Jonah: This system of exchange reached all over the globe, including Canada.

Dr. Carr: Sort of like everywhere the sailors went, it was really like a two way influence. The sailors culture influenced the culture of the areas that they visited. And then, you know, the sailors music was in turn influenced by the people from that area.

You know, I'd say another interesting example that may be interesting, interesting to some of your your Canadian readers is the idea that in the Arctic whaling industry in places like Greenland, places like Alaska, there were whaling ships that were, you know, hunting whales in the Arctic Sea and they would interact with the indigenous people of those areas.

And so you have native people in Greenland playing, you know, button accordions, which they would, you know, which they learned from from the sailors in Alaska.

You've got Inuit dances called hula hula that they learned from Hawaiian sailors who were visiting there during the Arctic whaling years.

Jonah: To bring it back to sea shanties though it turns out they have a fairly clear point of origin and it may not have even been at sea.

Dr. Carr: Well, so here's the thing. All the shantying basically starts in the cotton industry. There's there's really no evidence of shanties before they we start hearing songs like Fire Marengo, like General Taylor.

A lot of a lot of the songs that were earliest songs in this repertoire were sung by initially by black stevedores, people who were loading cotton on to ships and they were often operating these devices called cotton screws that were basically a big crank that they had to turn to compress the cotton into the hold of the ship.

These bales of cotton would have to be basically, like squeezed and compressed into the ship. So, yeah. And so that's it really is. It's not so much that black sailors may have influenced a song or two. They basically created the genre.

Jonah: If you pay attention to the lyrics of some of the songs, you can see the traces of this tradition. Listen.

♪ Fire Marengo, fire away. So screw the cotton, oh, screw it down. Fire Marengo, fire away. Let’s get the hell away from Shiloh town. Fire Marengo, fire away.  ♪

17:25

These cargo loading songs, along with several other traditions, had deep roots in the American South.

Dr. Carr: There was a tradition or, you know, multiple traditions of occupational work songs among slaves and among black Americans. And so the melodies and and some of the lyrics, a lot of them were probably taken from those prior work song traditions.

Another thing you'll see other than cotton screwing songs is songs about working on the railroad are also threaded through the sea shanty repertoire as well. References to working, you know, working on railroads. And those were often black songs as well. So, so there's probably a pre-existing genre of, you know, black work songs, cargo loading songs, heaving and hauling kind of songs that they were drawing on.

Jonah: Over time these songs and tunes initially brought about by those black stevedores started getting slowly integrated, potentially with some unsavory baggage.

Dr. Carr: Later on in the 19th century, and even as early as like the 1850s, a lot of the melodies for shanties were being taken from popular songs. They were like songs from the minstrel shows, songs that were popular on stage in America at that time.

You know, so sailors would make up a lyric, but they might sing it to a song that they heard, you know, performed in a minstrel show. And of course, minstrel show music is sort of a white interpretation or adaptation of black music.

So, you know, a lot of the melodies are kind of this fusion of white and black music, you know, European music written often or composed by European or Euro-American performers. That is then there's, you know, meant to imitate the black music of that time period.

So, you know, there's a lot of layers in the history of sea shanties of, of different kinds of cultural influences and, you know, interpretation of those influences.

So the songs definitely changed over time from being more heavily rhythmic and less melodic to songs that were more complex, that had more kind of melodic. Just more like a musical kind of song or more like a melodies taken from pop songs.

20:08

♪ We sail on the water blue. Whiskey, Johnny! A good long pull and a strong one too. Whiskey for my Johnny! Oh, whiskey killed my brother Tom. Whiskey, Johnny! So I drink whiskey all day long. Whiskey for my Johnny! ♪

Jonah: The evolution of sea shanties from songs associated with land work or cargo loading to more rhythmic tunes based on the popular music of the day is fascinating, but it also creates a sort of mythos around the origin of these songs as well as their ownership.

If ownership of a sea shanty is even possible at all, as Dr. Carr said, many of the true origins of sea shanties could probably stay mysteries forever.

The form, after all, is inherently changeable and dynamic. There may be popular arrangements or commonly used verses from song to song, but overall the Art of the sea shanty rested and in some ways still does rest in the mind of the person singing it.

Sea shanties belong to nobody, and as a consequence, they belong to everybody. This has been the case in Canada, especially Atlantic Canada, where a collective culture has turned into what could arguably be categorized as oral storytelling.

As Sean Dahger put it, even though these shanties and ballads have come mostly out of the East Coast, they've become emblematic of a larger national identity. One where Newfoundland and the Maritimes serve as a sort of portal which leads to a centuries old tradition that still stays alive in many small town pubs and backyard get togethers.

Shanties may not be Canadian, but Canadians are shanty people.

♪ Blow me winds and blow and a-rovin’ I will go. I’ll sail no more on this England shore till I hear that music play. I'm up on the morning train. I'll be back again. I'm taking a trip by government ship 10,000 miles away. ♪

22:31

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Our theme music is the Red River Jig performed by Alex Kusturok from his album Metis Fiddling for Dancing.

I'm Kate Jaimet. Thanks for joining me.