The Poetics of Sea Shanties, Part I
Unless you’ve been lost at sea, you’re likely familiar with the tidal wave of popularity that sea shanties have garnered since the beginning of the year. Shanty performances sailed to the top of the charts in the UK, netting three billion views on TikTok alongside a 7000% increase in Spotify listens by the end of January 2021.[1] Widescale coverage of the videos by mainstream news outlets may have contributed to this surge in stats. CNN announced on January 15th that sea shanties are the “soundtrack of the year”.[2] On the same day MSNBC called shanties “the perfect expression of masculinity for 2021,” creating a counterpoint to coverage of the aggressive, hypermasculinity of Trump supporters still protesting the election results.[3] Despite the more masculine bass voices often highlighted in shanty performances, subject matter across the genre allows for vulnerable displays of masculine emotion including pining for a loved one, fear of death at sea, sorrow for the loss of a fellow sailor, and the loneliness of months at sea. This association draws on what Anita Duneer, an associate professor of English at Rhode Island College, calls “the maritime romantic ideal” which centers around notions of brotherhood at sea.[4] During the early 19th century, when the shanties were most popular along the eastern seaboard of the US and on European vessels, sensibilities encouraged an outpouring of one’s emotions, free from shame, as an artistic ideal.
Humorous aspects of the shanty trend circulated on the late-night shows, playing up the fact that the phenomenon was largely started and propagated by millennials, namely Nathan Evans who posted the first viral video on Dec 27th of the “Wellerman”song. In an SNL skit (Feb. 21st 2021), shanty loving millennials are transported to what is presumably a 19th century whaling boat and are dumbfounded to learn what unpleasantries the daily life of a whaler actually entailed. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that collectively we would gravitate toward songs that celebrate comradery and physical labor at a time when the heroic qualities of the pandemic demanded quite the opposite from most.
There are many ways to read the cultural meanings of this trend and its context during a global pandemic. A considerable number of online articles have focused on characterizing the trend itself, including its new celebrities, and exploring the history of shanty singing, but what are the poetic dimensions of this trend? Are shanties the latest iteration of the cultural revolution that Dana Gioia recognizes in his 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture?
Gioia focuses on four versions of popular poetry—rap, cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and performance poetry—which have redefined our cultural relationship to poetry in the 21st century through works widely covered by the mass media.[5] These genres have allowed poetry to thrive in the marketplace without prior support from academia or the literary establishment.[6] He also recognizes four main ways that popular poetry differs from literary poetry: it is predominately oral, driven by innovation from marginalized demographics, characteristically formal in structure, and profitable without assistance from the literary establishment. The current sea shanty trend has much in common with other forms of popular poetry across these categories but also some differences that may disqualify it from characterization in the realm of popular poetry.
Sea Shanties began as an oral tradition, allowing men working on wind-powered vessels to synchronize the grueling tasks of manual labor through the rhythm of the songs: for example, pushing or pulling at the same time when hoisting sails. The songs involved a call and response structure in which a shantyman sang the main verses and the crew repeated each verse or the song’s chorus in return. According to a 1937 essay by music scholar Harold Whates, “in no circumstances were shanties ‘quaint’ or whimsical and rarely indeed had they any suggestion of jollity.”[7] Shanties were strictly work songs made up on the job and meant to “[extract] just that last ounce from men habitually weary, overworked and underfed.”[8] According to this definition, the balladic storytelling of TikTok’s most popular shanty “Wellerman” is technically not a shanty but a sea song. However, despite its length and extended storytelling, its rhythm, theme, and formal elements are very similar to more traditional shanties.
The earliest written record of shanty-like songs occurs in the 1830s, although nautical work songs are referenced in earlier European texts, notably William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.[9] However, the similarity of shanties to African American work songs is undeniable. It’s up for debate as to whether there was an established tradition of shanty singing on European merchant vessels prior to the slave trade, but many scholars, especially American ones, at least attribute the development of shanties into longer, more structured works to the influence of African American work songs on the eastern seaboard of the United States.[10] In some cases, it is possible to directly trace how work songs sung in docks in the southern US, particularly for boat rowing and the loading and unloading of ships in dock, were adapted for shipboard tasks.[11] Similar to shanties, work songs contain a call and response structure and a strong rhythm, which was used to synchronize manual labor and maintain morale during long and monotonous physical tasks. In this way, shanties most resemble the early origins of rap as it is traced back to the earliest vernacular oral traditions of African American slaves including spirituals, secular rhymes, ballads, and work songs.[12] Similar to the original circulation of work songs and shanties, the new shanty trend entirely bypasses print culture, reaching a global audience not of readers but of listeners and viewers.
Like other forms of popular poetry, shanties originated in the margins of society, among the working class and the predominately illiterate. The obsolescence of steam engines and decline of the whaling industry marginalized shanty singing even further.[13] Small communities in the UK and America kept the traditions alive within a practical context in small-scale fishing operations and as a living art form within the folk music scene.[14] Our current shanty trend also arose from the margins of the established musical and literary institutions and industries, notably among millennials and Gen Zs stuck at home during the pandemic. Nathan Evans himself worked for the post office until quite recently when he received a three-album record deal.
However, the origination of the current trend and its virality is wholly dependent on the TikTok app (although videos were transferred from TikTok to YouTube as the trend grew). TikTok is the most popular app available in terms of downloads and growth, which has been steadily increasing since its inception in 2016, surpassing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.[15] Two-thirds of its users are under 30 and a majority of those are Gen Zs who use the app more times a day and for much longer durations than Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.[16]
It may be TikTok’s novel features and functionalities, specifically the app’s duet function, more than the shanties themselves that are responsible for the current trend. While the original video is playing, users can record themselves, creating a new video that is a collage of both performances or, if done multiple times, a collage of many performances. They can arrange the performances on the screen using various layouts to change the position, size, and orientation of multiple videos. The app also contains visual and musical effects that can be used to alter recordings; although these effects have not been widely employed in the most viral sea shanty videos. The sea shanty trend started with users adding their own recordings of Evans’s original performance of the “Wellerman” song, eventually adding layered harmonies to his voice and musical accompaniment. This prompted a whole repertoire of similar group performances with the “Wellerman” and other shanties. TikTok has definitely allowed the general public to influence the musical and poetical trends for 2021 thus far. But, can the shanty trend really be characterized as arising from the margins when users are doing exactly what the TikTok app was designed for?
Tune in next week for a second installment of “The Poetics of Sea Shanties” where we’ll do a deep dive into the formal elements of the genre and examine the relationship between shanties and the TikTok app in more depth.
[1] https://www.wusa9.com/article/tech/sea-shanties-tik-tok-viewed-nearly-3-billion-times/65-8000acf4-0d8c-4b78-b100-2d2734be3f15 & https://www.insider.com/sea-shanty-tiktok-wellerman-shantytok-spotify-streaming-increase-2021-1
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/entertainment/sea-shanty-shanties-wellerman-tiktok-music-trnd/index.html
[3] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/sea-shanty-tiktok-perfect-expression-masculinity-2021-n1254325
[4] Ibid.
[5] Gioia, Dana. Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Graywolf Press, 2004, pg. 6.
[6] Ibid, pg 9.
[7] https://daily.jstor.org/whats-the-difference-between-a-shanty-and-a-sea-song/
[8] Ibid.
[9] Munnelly, Tom. “Songs of the Sea: A General Description with Special Reference to Recent Oral Tradition in Ireland.” Béaloideas, 48/49, 1980, pp. 30–58.
[10] Schreffler, Gibb. “Ethnic Choice in the Presentation of Chanties: A Study in Repertoire.” Presented at the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California and Hawai’i Chapter, Azusa Pacific Univ., CA, Feb. 2011.
[11] Ibid.
[12] https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197451
[13] https://news.wttw.com/2021/02/12/deep-dive-sea-shanty-craze-and-why-chicago-was-ahead-tiktok-trend
[14] Ibid. & “Shanties and Sea Songs with Gareth Malone.” BBC Four, aired Aug. 9, 2013.
[15] https://mediakix.com/influencer-marketing-resources/tik-tok-influencer-marketing/
[16] Ibid.