Like other forms of popular poetry, shanties are in alignment with New Formalism, a late 20^th and 21^st 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.

The post THE POETICS OF SEA SHANTIES, PART II appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

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 27^th of the “Wellerman”song. In an SNL skit (Feb. 21st 2021), shanty loving millennials are transported to what is presumably a 19^th 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 21^st 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.

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