Revisiting the sea shanty: Introduction

This Forum has its roots in ‘Atlantic Sounds: Music, Ships and Sailortowns’, a Research Network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Atlantic Sounds ran in 2012–2014, holding network meetings in London, Cardiff and Falmouth, and a final conference in Liverpool. The sea shanty was only part of the network’s focus, and a wide range of musical forms and cultures came together in the various meetings and events. Nonetheless, the shanty emerged as a particularly revealing genre deserving further study. It is well known that shanties had their heyday as labour songs accompanying the hard physical handling of rigging and sails in the mid-nineteenth-century sailing-ship sector. Rather less familiar is the subsequent history of the shanty, and the Atlantic Sounds meetings produced an intriguing chronology of successive shanty revivals after the decline of the sailing ship. By the time of the most recent revival in the early twenty-first century, sea shanties had existed as maritime heritage for appreciably longer than they were used for maritime work.

The articles published in this Forum take that series of shanty revivals as their overall framework, while recognising that shanties never actually died out between those peaks in their popularity. The first great era of interest in shanties occurred in the decade before the First World War, when folk music collectors and former seafarers sought to rescue what they saw as a dying, and possibly already lost, musical form. The second phase accompanied a broader folk music revival in the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, in the 2000s, shanties have become important to the festival circuit, and to old seaports pursuing cultural agendas in their waterfront regeneration projects. Importantly for historians, the two later revivals returned to the work of the first shanty collectors, while reading the meanings of those early texts through current preoccupations. This ‘post-maritime’ life of the sea shanty has been variously used to promote narratives of national seafaring identities, nostalgia and heritage, along with a formidable effort to conserve and revitalise old songs and make them accessible to new audiences. This seems rather fitting: as the articles here show, the shanty was always a heavily improvised and rapidly mutating form, which was used for many purposes.

Each of the articles that follow focuses on one of these key ‘moments’, while also ranging more broadly backwards and forwards through the history and historiography of shanties. Graeme Milne’s article locates pioneers like Smith, Whall and Bullen alongside their contemporaries, the much better known mainstream folk song collectors like Cecil Sharp. Gerry Smyth then moves on a ‘generation’ with a contribution that provides a new perspective on the justly famous Stan Hugill, who was responsible for major strides evident in shanty collecting, performing and scholarship during the 1960s. The third part of this Forum, by Catherine Tackley, places the current shanty movement in its historical context, as a vibrant cultural phenomenon pulling together elements of maritime heritage from port towns and seafaring work as well as the music itself, and serving a crucial social and economic function, often in communities that faced difficult times in the late twentieth century.

All three authors have benefited from the broad range of interpretative tools now available to scholars writing about shanties, and are also conscious that much more could be done with this material. Shanties turn out to be very revealing of national, class and other identities, whether in their lyrics, their use and performance, or in the backgrounds, approaches and attitudes of their collectors. Shanties cast useful light on a range of gender questions: born in a virtually all-male work environment, shanty lyrics were very often reflective of extreme definitions of masculinity and femininity alike, and each generation of revival has also raised issues of gender roles in collection and performance. Half a century of research about race and ethnicity has grown up since Stan Hugill wrote of the constantly evolving hybrid culture that created shanties around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. His pioneering work deserves to be taken further, using shanties to open up new perspectives on the various Atlantics – Black, Irish, Radical – discussed in Smyth’s article. The intersections, definitions and meanings of history, memory, heritage and nostalgia are all challenged by shanties, even (or especially) in their most recent manifestations, which cheerfully blend careful research into nineteenth-century shanty lyrics with exuberant performances owing more to Johnny Depp’s pirates than any historical merchant seaman. The authors of this Forum, and the other contributors to the Atlantic Sounds Network, hope that these articles might play a small part in opening up this area for further research.