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Heave Away! Why sea shanties bring the world together
625 Plays11 months ago
From Black stevedores in the American Deep South, to Hawaiian Inuit dances, to folk singers on Canada's East Coast music scene -- discover the fascinating world of sea shanties in a special episode by Canada's History contributor Jonah Grignon. With music recorded live by the Bytown Sea Shanty Collective.
Music credits:
Traditional shanties performed by the Bytown Sea Shanty Collective, used with permission of the artists
"Heave Away," traditional, performed by Roger McGuinn, licensed from freemusicarchive.org
"Hawaiian Ciribiribin" composed by Alberto Pestalozza, recorded in 1919 by Louise and Ferera, public domain https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hawaiian-ciribiribin-1919/
"Medley of sea songs," traditional, recorded in 1913, public domain https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-133664/
"Medley of sea chanties," traditional, recorded in 1914, public domain https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-649564/
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Transcript
Introduction to Sea Shanties Special
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Stories Behind the History. I'm Kate Jamit, 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, Joan Agrignon, for a special episode on sea shanties.
00:00:21
Speaker
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.
Canadian Innovations in History
00:00:37
Speaker
insulin, IMAX, the pager, even peanut butter. What do they all have in common? They were all invented by Canadians. Canada's history is filled with innovators that change the world around us. Join me, Craig Barrett, on my podcast Canadian History X for the stories of villains, heroes, daredevils, and bootleggers as we explore Canada's history. Search for and follow Canadian History X. That's EHX, wherever you find your favourite podcasts.
Cultural Impact of Sea Shanties in Canada
00:01:15
Speaker
Back in 2022, when Team Canada was playing in the World Junior's hockey tournament, they had the most interesting goal celebration song.
00:01:35
Speaker
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.
00:01:56
Speaker
The World Junior's 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 lockdowns, shanties had a bit of a moment on TikTok.
00:02:22
Speaker
A rendition of the wailing song Wellerman by Scottish Postman Nathan Evans went viral. As of Spring 2024, the original video was at 2.5 million likes on TikTok. The version Evans posted to YouTube has over 324 million views.
00:02:41
Speaker
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.
00:03:11
Speaker
I love your daughter. I, I roll and blow. For her I sail upon the water. Spend my money on Sally Brown. For seven long years I courted Sally. I, I roll and blow. She calls me boy and dilly dally. Spend my money on Sally Brown.
Origins and Functions of Sea Shanties
00:03:30
Speaker
Okay, 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 ships, 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.
00:04:05
Speaker
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.
00:04:26
Speaker
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. 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
00:04:54
Speaker
The majority of which I would say are related in some way to marine disaster. 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.
00:05:20
Speaker
And, as Sperling 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.
Sea Shanties in Grief and Protest
00:05:28
Speaker
Especially not when you weren't certain the shipwreck happened at all.
00:05:35
Speaker
which would kill many people at one time. And often, don't forget, too, the other issue with the sea, with maritime disasters, is that especially in the past, news of that event might 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.
00:06:00
Speaker
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 11 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.
00:06:30
Speaker
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 USA.
00:06:58
Speaker
And as an example, look no further than one of the most iconic, definitive Canadian folk songs ever, Stan Rogers' Barret's Privateers. If you don't know the song, you probably do, but on the off chance, Barret'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.
00:07:25
Speaker
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 worksongs of old. Listening to it, it's hard to believe it only predates Luke Skywalker's existence by one single year.
00:07:51
Speaker
Since Roger's death in 1983, plenty of Canadian musicians have carried on this legacy. The real Mackenzie's, Great Big C, the Dreadnoughts, the list goes on. But, of course, there's nothing inherently Canadian about sea shanties.
00:08:08
Speaker
They don't belong to Canada any more than they do to Australia or South Africa or the United Kingdom.
Global Influence and Cultural Exchange
00:08:15
Speaker
Sean Daeger 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.
00:08:38
Speaker
or where does that song come from? And my answer is, the songs, you know, they come from everywhere. You can classify the song by the language they're sung in. 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.
00:08:58
Speaker
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?
00:09:39
Speaker
I'm an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Kentucky, and I run a center here called the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music. That's Dr. James Ravel Carr. He's one of the leading authorities on sea shanties in the USA.
00:09:57
Speaker
I kind of started out very early in life working at a 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 the sort of
00:10:15
Speaker
folk music revival of sea shanties was happening back in the 70s and 80s. And so I was kind of around for that. I kind of grew up around people singing sea shanties, primarily in this kind of educational context. Some of his research has focused on the origins of shanties.
00:10:36
Speaker
And though many of the versions we now know make mention of Boston, Liverpool, New York, St. Malo, the first Chanties likely weren't American or Eurocentric at all.
00:10:47
Speaker
In grad school, I decided to write my dissertation on musical interactions 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.
00:11:17
Speaker
You know, looked at the history of Hawaiians 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.
00:11:41
Speaker
And there are shanties being sung by native Hawaiian singers. So it's a really interesting example of one of the earliest accounts of sea shanties. And it's not people from America. It's not American sailors. It's not British sailors singing the shanties. It's Hawaiian sailors.
00:12:21
Speaker
The cultural makeup of the ships on which shanties were being sung could be very diverse.
00:12:27
Speaker
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 three years or as long as five to even six or seven years. By necessity, whaling ships frequently would lose crewmen at various ports and then take on
00:12:53
Speaker
new seamen 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,
00:13:20
Speaker
Seaman from, you know, Indonesia, even occasionally Japanese. So there were, you know, lots of, you know, a variety of cultures represented aboard these ships. 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.
00:13:47
Speaker
I think one area certainly that influenced sailors 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 instrument that they could carry with them on the ship.
00:14:16
Speaker
So a zorian sailors brought that instrument to hawaii and then hawaii it caught on as a as a popular thing in hawaii so you know for that's one really easily traceable musical influence that came from you know the azores.
00:14:33
Speaker
This system of exchange reached all over the globe, including Canada. It's sort of like everywhere the sailors went it was really like a two-way influence. The sailors culture influenced the culture of the
00:14:48
Speaker
areas that they visited, and then, you know, the sailor's music was in turn influenced by the people from that area. You know, I'd say another interesting example that may be interesting to some of 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
00:15:18
Speaker
indigenous people of those areas. And so you have native people in Greenland playing button accordions, which they learned 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.
00:15:50
Speaker
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.
Roots in the Cotton Industry and Southern Work Songs
00:16:03
Speaker
All the shantying basically starts in the cotton industry. There's really no evidence of shanties before we start hearing songs like Fire Moringo, like General Taylor. A lot of the songs that were earliest songs in this repertoire were sung by, initially by black stevedores, people who were loading cotton onto ships.
00:16:32
Speaker
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
00:16:50
Speaker
squeezed and compressed into the ship. It's not so much that black sailors may have influenced a song or two, they basically created the genre. If you pay attention to the lyrics of some of the songs, you can see the traces of this tradition. Listen.
00:17:24
Speaker
These cargo loading songs, along with several other traditions, had deep roots in the American South. There was a tradition or multiple traditions of occupational work songs among slaves and among black Americans. And so the melodies and some of the lyrics, a lot of them were probably taken from those
00:17:50
Speaker
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 on railroads, and those were often black songs as well. So there's probably a pre-existing genre of
00:18:17
Speaker
you know, black work songs, cargo loading songs, heaving and hauling kind of songs that they were drawing on. Over time, these songs and tunes initially brought about by those black stevedores started getting slowly integrated, potentially with some unsavory baggage.
00:18:36
Speaker
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, like songs from the minstrel shows, songs that were popular on stage in America at that time. So sailors would make up a lyric, but they might sing it to a song that they heard performed in a minstrel show.
00:19:06
Speaker
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, you know,
00:19:32
Speaker
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
00:19:42
Speaker
different kinds of cultural influences and 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 music hall kind of song, more like melodies taken from pop songs.
Sea Shanties in Canadian Identity and Evolution
00:20:28
Speaker
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.
00:20:35
Speaker
and a strong one too.
00:20:49
Speaker
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.
00:21:07
Speaker
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.
00:21:29
Speaker
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.
00:21:41
Speaker
As Sean Daeger 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.
00:22:14
Speaker
I will go. I'll stay more on England shore. Hear the music play. I'm off on a morning train. I won't be back again. I'm taking a trip on a government ship 10,000 miles away.
Podcast Production and Subscription
00:22:31
Speaker
The Stories Behind the History podcast is produced by Canada's History Society. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners to find us. If you'd like to read more stories about Canadian history, why not subscribe to Canada's History magazine? Our beautifully illustrated glossy magazine will be delivered to your home
00:22:53
Speaker
Six times a year, chock full of interesting stories written by Canada's top historians and journalists. To subscribe to the magazine, go to canadahshistory.ca slash subscribe. Our theme music is the Red River Jig, performed by Alex Kustrok from his album, May T Fiddling for Dancing. I'm Kate Jamit. Thanks for joining me.