Leave Her Johnny: the meaning of the sailors' end-of-voyage shanty

Leave Her, Johnny: the shanty for the last job of the voyage

"Leave Her, Johnny" is a farewell, and not a fond one. Sailors on merchant sailing ships sang it at the very end of a passage, when the ship had made port, the cargo was out and the crew had one more spell of hard labour before they could take their pay and walk away. The "her" is the ship. The message, repeated in every chorus, is that it is time to leave her, and most verses explain why the singers will not miss her.

It belongs to the merchant service. A merchant seaman signed articles for a single voyage and was free at its end, which is what gives the song its edge: unlike a man taken up by the press gang and held in a warship for years, the singers knew the day of release was close. The Royal Navy, as our page on Royal Navy songs explains, mostly kept its crews silent at work, so a song like this would have had no place on a man-of-war.

Work at the pumps

Every wooden ship leaked, and many iron ones did too, so pumping was a daily chore at sea. On a big sailing ship the pumps were worked by hand, often with long brakes rocked up and down or with flywheels turned by several men at once. It was dull, heavy and endless, and like any steady repetitive job it suited a song with a regular swing.

Collectors disagree about exactly which job "Leave Her, Johnny" was meant for. Captain W. B. Whall and Sir Richard Terry printed it as a hauling song for the halyards; Joanna Colcord and William Main Doerflinger gave it as a pumping song. Stan Hugill, who had sung shanties at sea himself before writing the standard book on them, printed verses for both. He thought it was sometimes sung at the pumps during a voyage, but that its real purpose was to air grievances as the voyage ended.

One account ties the two together neatly. According to the notes in a Great Lakes song collection, crews kept the song for the final task of the trip: pumping the ship dry after she had been unloaded in port, with the town and the pay office in plain sight. Nobody wanted to be doing it, and the song says so.

The meaning of the complaints in the verses

What makes the song memorable is its honesty, and its meaning needed no explaining to a crew. The verses are a list of everything wrong with the ship: bad food, low wages, a hard mate, a mean captain, foul weather and a leaky hull. A typical set of traditional words runs like this:

Oh, the times are hard and the wages low,
Leave her, Johnny, leave her!
I'll pack my bag and go below;
It's time for us to 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.

Singing that kind of thing earlier in the voyage was asking for trouble. The sailor and author Frank Bullen wrote that to strike it up before the last day or so was "almost tantamount to mutiny". At the end of the trip, with the articles nearly expired, the officers let it pass. The folklorist Kenneth Goldstein described it in the same terms, as the one moment when sailors could say what they thought of ship and officers without fear of punishment.

Because the verses were a vehicle for grumbling, they were never fixed. A shantyman would make up lines about the actual ship, the actual mate and the actual food, and the chorus answered him. The version in any collection is one frozen snapshot of something that changed every time it was sung.

Leave Her, Bullies and other variants

The song turns up under several names. "Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her" is the fullest title. Some singers address the whole crew instead of one man, with "Leave her, bullies, leave her", bully being an old word for a comrade or a fine fellow long before it meant a tormentor. The East Anglian bargeman Bob Roberts sang a version as "Time for Us to Leave Her", and one of the earliest printed fragments, from 1917, carries a similar title.

The tune and some of the words are shared with "Across the Western Ocean", an emigrant song about crossing the Atlantic. Doerflinger thought "Leave Her, Johnny" grew out of it, and Hugill placed its origins around the time of the Irish famine emigration of the 1840s. Neither can be proved, but the family likeness is clear when you hear them side by side. Folk song indexes file it as Roud 354.

Where to find it in print

Beyond Whall, Terry, Colcord and Doerflinger, the song appears in Cecil Sharp's English Folk Chanteys, in Hugill's Shanties from the Seven Seas, which gives five texts and two tunes, and in Roy Palmer's Oxford Book of Sea Songs. Carl Sandburg included it in The American Songbag, which shows how far it had travelled from the docks.

Notable recordings

The folk revival picked it up early. Dave Van Ronk sang it with Paul Clayton and the Foc'sle Singers on Foc'sle Songs and Shanties for Folkways in 1959, and Bob Roberts recorded his barge version for the 1960 HMV album A Pinch of Salt. Stan Hugill himself sang it live aboard the Cutty Sark at Greenwich in June 1979, a performance released that year on Aboard the Cutty Sark.

Later versions include Louis Killen's on A Seaman's Garland in 1997 and a live performance by the Canadian singer Stan Rogers, issued after his death on From Coffee House to Concert Hall in 1999. Lou Reed sang it on the 2006 anthology Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys, and Jon Boden recorded it for his A Folk Song a Day project in 2010.

Its most recent burst of attention came through social media. "Leave Her, Johnny" was the first traditional shanty Nathan Evans posted on TikTok, in July 2020, months before his "Wellerman" took off, and he included it on his 2022 album of sea songs. For the wider family of working songs it belongs to, from capstan to halyard, see our guide to sea shanties.