New Sea Chantey Compilations On Compact Disc

Recently, a pirate-oriented fan subculture fueled by Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movie series has been growing across the United States. With it, a great many musical groups have begun performing sea chanteys and sailor songs in both traditional and innovative arrangements, inventing new genres like “pirate rock.” The heavily synergistic Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has lent its imagery to everything from breakfast cereal to pinball machines, so it was not surprising when a collection of sea songs was recently released under the Pirates brand name. This anthology, called Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys (2006), is uneven and anachronistic, but it is a fascinating example of semi-obscure folk materials interpreted by contemporary singers for the mass market. The producer of Rogue’s Gallery, Hal Wilner, proclaims in the liner notes that “with the exception of some collectors and scholars, this was a totally unexplored kind of folk music” (2006:4). Two other recent anthologies—American Sea Songs and Shanties (2004) from the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress and Classic Maritime Music (2004) from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings—provide evidence that sea music was, in fact, well explored in the late twentieth century.

“Sea music” as a category describes a variety of musical forms primarily associated with European and American seafaring cultures. The standard sea music canon draws mainly upon repertoire associated with two types of nineteenth-century ships: packet ships (fast cargo vessels that worked regular runs between such cities as Liverpool, San Francisco, and Shanghai) and whalers (small, slow vessels that cruised the world hunting whales). Sea music encompasses a range of musical practices, primarily the sailors’ work songs, or “chanteys,” but also ballads and social songs (called “forecastle songs” or “forebitters”), instrumental dance music, and modern re arrangements, reinterpretations, and imitations of these forms. But even this broad range of sea-related music does not fully encompass the musical environment of seamen during the nineteenth century, which also included blackface minstrelsy, African American banjo and fiddle music, Hawaiian hula songs, Iberian fandango, Indonesian gamelan, and anything else that sailors encountered in their wanderings.

At the center of the sea music repertoire is the sea chantey or “shanty” (as it is more commonly spelled in England), a genre of work song that was intrinsic to the technology of sailpowered seafaring.¹ Chanteys were not simply a means of keeping and passing time while engaged in work but were tools designed to facilitate specific shipboard tasks. Every job had a corresponding set of chanteys, the meter, tempo, and rhythm of which were designed to efficiently coordinate the ergonomics of the particular task. The chanteyman’s craft was coordinating the work, keeping the pace lively but not exhausting, and creating rhythms that kept the crew in tight coordination. This was especially important during ships’ maneuvers, such as tacking or wearing, which required many lines to be handled in the proper order and with precise timing (Hugill 1969:85; Smith 1888:13). The importance of chanteying to the coordination of shipboard labor led to the old sailors’ adage, “When the men sing right, the ship goes right” (Hugill 1969:68).

There are two basic kinds of chanteys—the hauling type, which includes halyard and bunting chanteys, and the heaving type, such as pumping and capstan chanteys (Hugill 1961:26). The major distinction is that hauling chanteys were used when jobs required periodic, intermittent force to be applied (i.e., quick pulls on a halyard or other line of running rigging), while heaving chanteys, by contrast, were used for jobs that required continuous, sustained effort, such as raising the anchor or pumping the ship’s bilge (Colcord 1924:31; Hugill 1961:26). Hauling chanteys tend to feature alternating lines of call and response, with one, two, or three stressed beats upon which the crew pulls during the response lines. Heaving chanteys use longer verse-chorus forms, often with more elaborate call-and-response parts and syncopated marching rhythms.

While the tunes and rhythms have remained relatively stable in the process of transmission, the lyrics of chanteys have been far...