Sea Chanteys

[Roland]

On Thursday, January 25, at 7pm EST, Annapolis Maritime Museum will host a lecture, "Chanteys: Sailing Work Songs of the Sea," presented by Dr. Jessica Floyd. Tickets are only $10, and there is a virtual attendance option. Details here:
https://amaritime.org/event/chanteys-sailing-work-songs-of-the-sea-presenter-professor-and-author-dr-jessica-floyd/

I just registered to attend remotely.

[Roland]

Dr Floyd's talk on chanteys was quite the lecture! Unfortunately, she is not a singer, so we did not actually get to hear any chanteys sung. She's a literary scholar with a particular interest in the erotic. She had done a lot of work on the "Restoration Rakes". When she was getting tired of that, her father sang "Blow the Man Down" to her, and she was immediately hooked on bawdy sea songs.

Important things I learned:
1) It's pronounced "shantey" even when it's spelled with a 'c'.
2) The preferred term is just "chantey", not "sea chantey".
3) A chantey is a work song. Historically, they were sung by merchant sailors, not pirates or naval sailors. (The navy has its own tradition of work music, using instruments rather than a cappella singing.) They bear some resemblance to other work songs - e.g., the chant of a chain gang or a military marching cadence.
4) Since they were work songs, there were different types of chanteys for different types of work. Capstan songs, for example, had longer lines than pulling songs.
5) The extant collections of chanteys date from the 19th and 20th centuries, when British and American scholars compiled them. But it's likely that they go back as far as the 15th century.
6) It's not clear to what extent the words of chanteys were fixed. Apparently, a sailor who could improvise a chantey for the job at hand and the life experiences of the crew was well respected.
7) Unfortunately, those collections of chanteys were all censored and cleaned up, so we can only guess at their original bawdiness. But it seems that sailors used their songs to express their negative opinions of their bosses, officers, landlubbers, and anyone else who annoyed them.
8) It has been said that a good chantey was worth an extra 10 men. The rhythm of the chantey helped to organize the work, helping the sailors to work more efficiently.

If you want to hear authentic chanteys, she recommends chantey demonstrations from Mystic Seaport, like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqnnlu1Tgts

Dr Floyd has a book coming out this fall - Cabin Boys, Milkmaids, and Rough Seas. She describes it as a scholarly publication on erotic chanteys.

A search turned up some of her work online:
https://globalmaritimehistory.com/dr-jessica-m-floyd/

[corsair91]

A Deep Dive Into Sea Shanties
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2021/01/a-deep-dive-into-sea-shanties/

Stephen Winick
January 29, 2021



Sea Chanteys on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Sea+Chanteys



The Jolly Rogers
https://www.youtube.com/@TheJollyRogers/videos

Shanties



Bruce Springsteen - Pay Me My Money Down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiMYqDD9kXw

Some Country Music cross-over
Lyrics on Youtube Page