Sea shanty songs: the types, the history and the work behind them

What is a sea shanty? The work song of the merchant ship

A sea shanty is a work song, made to keep a gang of sailors pulling or pushing together on a big sailing ship. It was not concert music and it was not sung for fun. The words were a tool, in the same way as a block or a handspike: a lead singer gave a line, the crew roared back the refrain, and the heaviest effort fell on a fixed beat of the chorus. Shanties were sung without instruments, and in their working life they were sung only while the job was being done.

The home of the sea shanty was the merchant ship. Big square-riggers carried small crews for the weight of canvas and cargo they handled, and a song was the cheapest way to get twenty tired men to throw their weight on a rope at the same instant. The form grew up in the Atlantic trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, and most historians put its high point in the 1870s. Steam killed it. A steamship needs no gang hauling up yards, and as early as 1882 an American writer was already mourning the songs as a dying art.

Nobody is sure where the word comes from. The usual explanation is the French chanter, to sing, and the spelling has wandered between chanty, chantey and shanty. British usage settled on "shanty" in the twentieth century, while American writers often keep "chantey".

Types of sea shanty songs: hauling, heaving and pumping

Sailors sorted their songs by the job, because the rhythm of the work decided the rhythm of the music. The main types of sea shanty songs fall into these families.

Short-haul shanties

Also called short-drag or sheet shanties, these were for a few hard, quick pulls on a sheet, brace or tack. There is one big pull in each chorus, usually on the last word, and the song stops as soon as the rope is home. "Haul Away Joe" and "Boney Was a Warrior" belong here.

Halyard shanties

Hoisting a heavy yard up the mast could take many minutes, so halyard songs are longer, with a solo line, a short refrain, another solo and a second refrain. The crew pulled twice in each chorus and rested while the shantyman sang. "Blow the Man Down" and "Whisky Johnny" are typical.

Capstan shanties

The capstan raised the anchor. Men pushed on bars slotted into its head and walked round and round, which is steady, continuous work, so capstan shanties have long verses and a full chorus that the whole gang could sing as they tramped. "Rio Grande" and "Shenandoah" were favourites.

Pumping shanties

Wooden ships leaked, and the pumps were manned watch after watch on a long passage. Pumping songs had to last, and they gave the crew room to grumble. "Leave Her, Johnny" was one of them, and so were many capstan songs borrowed for the purpose.

A few more groups sit between these: hand-over-hand songs for light sails, windlass songs for ships that weighed anchor with a brake windlass, and the stamp-and-go or walkaway song, where a long line of men marched the rope along the deck. That last kind is the job "Drunken Sailor" did best.

Forebitters are not shanties

Off watch, sailors sang other songs entirely. These leisure pieces are called forebitters, after the fore bitts where men gathered in fine weather, or forecastle songs. They tell stories, they have no work rhythm, and they could be played on a fiddle or a concertina. Many songs now sold as "sea shanties" are really forebitters or ballads.

The shantyman, and the navy that stayed quiet

Every working shanty had a leader. The shantyman was usually one of the ordinary crew who took the job on himself, on top of his normal duties, because he had a good voice and a quick tongue. He picked the song to match the task, set the pace, and improvised verses as he went, mixing stock lines with jokes about the mate, the food, the cook or the girls in the next port. A good one could add real speed to a heavy job, and crews valued him for it.

The Royal Navy wanted nothing of the sort. A warship carried hundreds of men, orders had to be heard above everything, and work went on in silence or to the pipe, the fife or the fiddle. That is the reason the shanty is a merchant sailor's form and only touches naval life at the edges. Our page on Royal Navy songs follows what naval sailors sang instead, from the official march to the lower-deck songs of the twentieth century.

Collectors: Cecil Sharp, Richard Terry and Stan Hugill

Most of what we know about shanties comes from a handful of people who wrote them down while old sailors were still alive. The folk song collector Cecil Sharp published English Folk-Chanteys in 1914. The bulk of it came from one singer, John Short of Watchet in Somerset, a former deep-water shantyman born in 1839 and known locally as Yankee Jack. Sharp met him that year, when Short was in his mid seventies, and was struck by the power and flexibility of his voice.

The composer and organist Richard Runciman Terry argued for the "shanty" spelling and published The Shanty Book in two parts, in 1921 and 1926. Earlier, Captain W. B. Whall had printed his own collection from his years at sea, and the poet John Masefield had written about the songs too.

The giant of the field was Stan Hugill, born in Hoylake in 1906. He sailed as shantyman aboard the Garthpool, often described as the last British commercial sailing ship, which was wrecked off the Cape Verde Islands in 1929. He spent the rest of his life collecting, singing and teaching, including twenty-five years as an instructor at the Outward Bound sea school at Aberdyfi in Wales. His Shanties from the Seven Seas, published in 1961, holds more than four hundred shanties and sea songs and is still the standard reference. He died in 1992 and is often called the last working shantyman.

The 2021 revival

Shanties never quite left. From the 1950s they were a staple of the folk clubs, then of maritime festivals and amateur shanty choirs in coastal towns all round Britain and northern Europe. From 2010 the Port Isaac group Fisherman's Friends carried Cornish harbour-wall singing to a national audience, and a feature film about them followed in 2019.

Then, in the first weeks of 2021, millions of people locked down at home started singing along to sailors' songs on TikTok. The spark was a video by Nathan Evans, a Scottish postman, singing "Soon May the Wellerman Come", and other users layered their own harmonies and basslines on top. His single came out in January 2021, and a dance remix reached number one in the UK Singles Chart. The irony is that "The Wellerman" is not a work shanty at all. It is a New Zealand whaling ballad, named after the supply ships of the Weller brothers' whaling station in Otago, and it has no hauling rhythm built into it.

Famous sea shanties to start with

If you want to learn the real thing, begin with the songs that crews used and singers still know. These famous sea shanties are a sound starting set.

• Drunken Sailor: the stamp-and-go song everyone learns first. Read the full story of the Drunken Sailor.
• Leave Her, Johnny: the song for the end of the voyage, when crews could finally say what they thought of the ship. See Leave Her, Johnny.
• Blow the Man Down: a classic halyard shanty from the Western Ocean packet ships.
• Haul Away Joe: short-haul work in its simplest form, one pull per chorus.
• Rio Grande: a capstan song for heaving up the anchor at the start of a voyage.
• The Wellerman: not a shanty, but the song that brought a new generation to the others.

The way in is the way sailors learned. Find a session, a shanty night or a maritime festival, keep quiet through the verses and come in hard on the chorus.