THE POETICS OF SEA SHANTIES, PART II
This week’s post is a continuation of last week where we examined the current sea shanty trend and began to situate it in relation to popular poetry as defined in Dana Gioia’s 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture? Gioia identifies four 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. This week we’ll look at the second two in this list.
Like other forms of popular poetry, shanties are in alignment with New Formalism, a late 20th and 21st century poetic movement which advocates for a return to narrative poetry and traditional poetical forms—mainly rhyme, meter, and stanzaic symmetry (meaning stanzas that are of uniform length throughout the poem). Shanties are unabashedly awash in all three of these formal elements and narration is also common, especially to those shanties that some scholars technically call sea songs. In this way, shanties are similar to traditional rap, which commonly uses rhymed couplets (pairs of lines that have a similar end rhyme), assonance and consonance (repetition of vowel or consonant sounds), alliteration (repetition of consonants at the beginning of words, especially within a line) and the four-stress accentual line which is the most popular meter (pattern of stressed syllables) for English popular spoken verse from ballads to Rudyard Kipling to Mother Goose.[1] In accentual meter, only the stressed syllables are counted. Here’s an example from the opening stanza of the most viral of shanties “Wellerman” with the stressed syllables marked in red:
There `once was a `ship that `put to `sea
And the `name of that `ship was the `Billy o’ `Tea
The `winds blew `hard, her `bow dipped `down
`Blow, me `bully boys, `blow `hunh
Notice how line two has twelve syllables and line four has only six, but they both contain four accented syllables which provides the beat. In keeping with the rhythm of the song, line two is sung much faster than line four. This first stanza also illustrates the full end rhyme with ‘sea’ and ‘tea’ (also called true or masculine rhyme). The second couplet ending with ‘down’ and ‘blow’ are slant or off rhymes, creating two sounds that almost rhyme. These words are also a great example of how the sounds of words can align with the content of a poem—’ow’ and ‘oh’ are both phrases you might hear on a boat when the bow is dipping down in heavy wind. Throughout the last two lines, the assonance of ‘ow’ and the alliteration of the letter ‘b’ with its bursting and breathy pronunciation accentuate the blowing of the wind.
The following four stanzas and the chorus also has four lines each, but the end rhyme is a little different. The first three lines of each of these stanzas has the same end rhyme while the fourth line (which is always visually shorter than the other three) rhymes with the ‘blow’ of the opening stanza. Here is the chorus as an example, showing full end rhyme in the first two lines and slant rhyme in the third line. In addition, the ‘go’ rhymes with ‘blow’.
Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing’ is done
We’ll take our leave and go
However, not all of the shanties rely so heavily on rhyme, especially the ones which scholars would call more traditional shanties as opposed to sea songs. “Drunken Sailor”, a traditional shanty and perhaps the second most popular next to “Wellerman” in the current trend, is arguably the most popular shanty throughout history as well as one of the first recorded.[2] This shanty was used for hauling, specifically the hand-over-hand work required to raise the smaller sails of a ship.[3] Here is the first stanza:
`What shall we `do with a `drunken `sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor,
`early `in the `mor `ning?
Akin to work songs, these types of shanties rely more on repetition than rhyme for their sing-song quality. Every stanza follows the structure of a single line, repeated three times, then followed by a catch phrase which is the same for every stanza. All the lines stick to the four-stress accentual meter but the catch phrase “early in the morning” is significantly shorter, stressing words that wouldn’t be stressed in normal speech. This means that the stressed beats, as notes of the melody, are held for much longer than the notes of previous lines. An alignment between form and content occurs with the pronunciation of ‘early’ in sailor lingo as ‘er-lie’ repeating the ‘r’ sounds in “drunken sailor”. The ‘r’ sound itself is connotative of the growling and painful rumblings that might be emitted by a sailor upon waking with a hangover.
Shanties generally contain some combination of the formal elements that are evident in these two examples. From a casual survey of performances, one could say that the more formal the shanty, the more views it is likely to have on TikTok and YouTube. Not only do formal elements make a poem easier to memorize, but they also provide an innate physical pleasure for both the performer and listener, a type of sensory evolution that a 500-year print culture has not eliminated.[4]
The formal elements of traditional rap and shanties are similar, but there is a fundamental difference in the way the two are performed. Traditional rap is more oriented toward the poetry of words, relying on rhyme and rhythm to create its musical qualities. Shanties have a melody that rides over the rhythm like a wave, and with a melody comes harmony which you’ll hear in many of the group performances. Indeed, one can’t accurately perform most of the popular sea shanties without knowing this melody since there is no way to derive it from the words alone. This facet perhaps, makes all of the popular shanties more like songs then poetry. However, since Bob Dylan won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 2016 for his song lyrics, literature’s definition appears to be evolving alongside popular poetry, including performative aspects that cannot be discerned from the traditional print medium.
Although rap far exceeds the other three forms of popular poetry in Gioia’s list—cowboy poetry, slam poetry and performance poetry—in terms of profitability and has come to rely on the recording industry for the brunt of its profit, live performances are an essential element of all popular poetry. The current shanty trend didn’t rely on live but virtual performances. There were some bands prior to the trend that profited from live performances of shanties—none as consistently as the nationally recognized Canadian folk-rock band Great Big Sea. Sea shanty videos now have a global audience but this has translated to relatively little profitability for the plethora of performers. There are increasingly more opportunities for influencers to generate an income through advertising within their TikTok material,[5] but sea shanties did not become viral through influencers. Nathan Evans was recently able to quit his job as a postal carrier after receiving a three-album record deal, and the Bristol folk band The Longest Johns signed record deals as well,[6] but it’s too early to tell whether anyone else other than TikTok will profit.
In their heyday in the 1900s, shanties were oral, innovating from the margins, and contained formal elements, but they were generally not profitable. In their current state on TikTok with words and forms hundreds of years old, they lack the creativity characteristic of other forms of popular poetry. Rap may incorporate samples from older musical works, but new forms and lyrics are being created daily. Cowboy poetry, a much older form than rap, continues to be written and celebrated in its contemporary forms, most notably at the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
Aside from adding new harmonies and instrumental accompaniment (which may not be completely new in some cases), the innovation in current popular sea shanties lies in the way they are performed, which is heavily influenced by the capabilities of the TikTok app. One of the most notable innovations on this trend is the transformation of pop songs into sea shanties (see especially Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” as a sea shanty @sampopemusic). This is not to say that the trend won’t verge toward original lyrics and forms in the near future. Many new sea shanty groups have popped up on Reddit since the beginning of the year including discussions on how to write a shanty. The trend isn’t just for teens and adults either—there were quite a few animated sea shanty videos on the internet for children prior to this year and now there are even more. Also prior to the pandemic, there were small maritime inspired folk festivals and venues that featured traditional shanty performances like the University of Chicago’s Folk Festival, and it will be interesting to see if these creative gatherings grow.[7]
Regardless of how the trend continues after the pandemic, it may have less to say about a new direction in poetry and more to say about the longing for new kinds of creativity. As rightsholders push for longer and broader copyright holds, more of the past becomes locked up and buried as far as the general public’s use is concerned.[8] The kind of creativity we see on TikTok is collaborative across space and time, and it’s easy to make and distribute in a way that the recording and literary industries cannot control. While our capitalist culture likes to distill definitive ownership of any profitable act, throughout history, creativity has been a collaborative process that reincorporates and remakes previous works. Anyone who performs or remixes a contemporary song or poem without paying royalties could face copyright infringement. Sea shanties are perfect for the kind of creativity that happens on TikTok because they exist in the public domain, free for anyone to remix and reconfigure. I’ll leave you with this pertinent quote from Business Insider on the issue: “Too often, copyright locks the booze away and only lets the captain get drunk”.[9]
[1] Gioia, pg 14.
[2] https://daily.jstor.org/whats-the-difference-between-a-shanty-and-a-sea-song/
[3] https://seashanties.weebly.com/drunken-sailor.html
[4] Gioia, Ibid, pg 13.
[5] https://mediakix.com/influencer-marketing-resources/tik-tok-influencer-marketing/
[6] https://apnews.com/article/music-media-social-media-wellington-new-zealand-2651b9802155fb5fdac7af622df0bb21
[7] https://news.wttw.com/2021/02/12/deep-dive-sea-shanty-craze-and-why-chicago-was-ahead-tiktok-trend
[8] https://www.businessinsider.com/viral-sea-shanties-tiktok-reveal-about-our-broken-copyright-system-2021-1
[9] Ibid.