What shall we do with the drunken sailor? Where the song began
"What shall we do with the drunken sailor?" is probably the best-known sailors' song in the English language, and nobody knows who made it. There is no composer, no first singer and no date of birth. What survives is a trail of mentions, the earliest of them from an American whaling voyage.
In 1839 a young man named Francis Allyn Olmsted sailed out of New London, Connecticut, on a whaler bound for the Pacific, and in 1841 he published Incidents of a Whaling Voyage. In it he describes "Drunken Sailor" as a song "performed with very good effect when there is a long line of men hauling together." That is the first time the song appears in print, and it already tells us what it was for.
It may be older. A collection of Maine songs published in 1927 records a grandmother's memory of hearing it while a boat was tacking on the Penobscot River, which would push its use back to the 1820s. Memories like that cannot be checked, but they fit a song that was clearly well established by the time anyone thought to write it down. Its author, like the authors of most shanties, was whichever crew first found the words useful.
Song history: the first printed sources
After Olmsted the record thins out, then picks up in the last years of the century. In 1855 a story in Charles Dickens's weekly magazine Household Words had a drunken cook singing it, which shows the song had already reached shore. The earliest printed music with a full set of words came in the 1891 edition of Sailor Songs or 'Chanties' by Frederick Davis and Ferris Tozer, with five verses. No other major nineteenth-century shanty book bothered with it.
The sailor-authors of the early twentieth century were a little sniffy about it. John Masefield, who had served at sea as a boy, wrote in 1906 that it was a "bastard variety" of shanty and seldom used. Captain W. B. Whall gave it a place in his Sea Songs and Shanties of 1910, and Richard Runciman Terry printed the melody most people now sing in The Shanty Book in 1921.
| Year | Source |
|---|---|
| 1841 | Olmsted's Incidents of a Whaling Voyage describes it, from a voyage begun in 1839 |
| 1855 | A story in Household Words puts it in a drunken cook's mouth |
| 1891 | Davis and Tozer print words and music, five verses |
| 1906 | Masefield's A Sailor's Garland calls it a runaway chorus; Percy Grainger records a London singer |
| 1910 | Whall's Sea Songs and Shanties |
| 1921 | Terry's The Shanty Book, Part One prints the familiar tune |
A stamp-and-go shanty
Most shanties were sung by men standing still, hauling or heaving in one spot. "Drunken Sailor" belongs to a smaller and odder group, the stamp-and-go or walkaway shanties. A long line of men took hold of a rope and marched it along the deck, stamping in time, then ran back and took a fresh grip at the far end. Masefield called it a runaway chorus and said it was sung in quick time, mainly when going about. The song suits the job: each line is the same length, the beat falls on every step, and nothing in it needs a breath or a pause.
Walkaway hauling needed a lot of hands, and merchant crews shrank as the century went on. Whall said the song dropped out of use for exactly that reason. The big crews were on warships, and that explains its unusual place in naval history: on a man-of-war, where shanty singing was frowned on, a marching chorus with dozens of men on one rope was about the only kind the officers would put up with. Our guide to Royal Navy songs covers that tradition in full.
Other sailors remembered it for different work. An American seaman of the 1870s, Frederick Pease Harlow, recalled it being used for hand-over-hand hauling when setting lighter sails, and another old hand, Richard Maitland, sang it for Alan Lomax in 1939 and linked it with walking away with a rope while scrubbing the ship's bottom.
The tune and the Dorian mode
Anyone who has picked out the melody on a piano has noticed that it sounds minor but not quite. It is in the Dorian mode, one of the old church modes: think of a natural minor scale with the sixth note raised by a semitone. In D, that means a scale running D, E, F, G, A, B, C, with a B natural where a minor key would have B flat.
The harmony is as plain as the work. The tune moves back and forth between two chords a whole tone apart, D minor and C major, and the melody repeats the same phrase at a lower pitch on each step down. That sequence, and the habit of repeating one line three times before a closing line, make the song almost impossible to forget. Several writers have pointed out its likeness to the Irish song "Óró sé do bheatha abhaile", which shares the chord pattern and the repeated-line build. Whether one borrowed from the other is unknown.
The traditional verses
The structure is a question and a remedy. One verse asks what the crew should do with the drunk, each following verse proposes a punishment or a cure, and the chorus follows every verse. In one common traditional form the opening verse and chorus run like this:
What shall we do with the drunken sailor,
What shall we do with the drunken sailor,
What shall we do with the drunken sailor,
Early in the morning?
Way hay and up she rises,
Way hay and up she rises,
Way hay and up she rises,
Early in the morning.
The remedies that follow were never fixed. In the older printed sets the drunk is put in the longboat until he is sober, or has his belly shaved with a rusty razor, and the shantyman was free to invent more as long as the line still fitted the beat. Whall thought his own handful of verses were enough, because a walkaway job was short. Collectors of the period also tended to keep the rougher verses out of print.
The drunken sailor song today
The song came ashore early and stayed there. By the 1900s it was in the glee-club repertoire at Eton College, and by the 1910s it was being sung at London's Savage Club. Percy Grainger recorded a London singer, Charles Rosher, performing it in 1906, and the composer Malcolm Arnold used it in his Three Shanties for Woodwind Quintet in 1943. The tune also carries the Lent and Easter hymn "We Have a King Who Rides a Donkey" by Fred Kaan.
Today the drunken sailor song turns up everywhere: in school music lessons, at folk club singarounds, on film soundtracks and in the set of practically every shanty band and choir in Britain, from village choirs to touring groups such as the Cornish Fisherman's Friends. For the working background behind it, start with our guide to sea shanties. Then try "Leave Her, Johnny", the song that crews kept for the end of the voyage, which sits at the opposite end of a sailor's mood.
FAQ
Who wrote Drunken Sailor?
No one knows. It is a traditional song with no known author, first described by a passenger on an American whaling voyage that set out in 1839.
What kind of shanty is Drunken Sailor?
It is a walkaway or stamp-and-go shanty, sung while a long line of sailors marched a rope along the deck. Some sailors also used it for lighter hand-over-hand hauling.
What key is Drunken Sailor in?
It is in the Dorian mode, usually sung in D Dorian over alternating D minor and C major chords.
Is Drunken Sailor a Royal Navy song?
It started on merchant and whaling ships, but its marching rhythm made it one of the very few shanties tolerated aboard British warships.
Is Drunken Sailor out of copyright?
Yes. The traditional words and tune are in the public domain, although individual modern arrangements and recordings have their own copyright.