A sea shanty, shanty, chantey, or chanty () is a genre of traditional folk song that was once commonly sung as a work song to accompany rhythmical labor aboard large merchant sailing vessels. The term shanty most accurately refers to a specific style of work song belonging to this historical repertoire. However, in recent, popular usage, the scope of its definition is sometimes expanded to admit a wider range of repertoire and characteristics, or to refer to a "maritime work song" in general.
Likely from Latin cantare via French chanter, the word shanty emerged in the mid-19th century in reference to an appreciably distinct genre of work song, developed especially on merchant vessels, that had come to prominence in the decades prior to the American Civil War.Hugill, Stan, Shanties from the Seven Seas: Shipboard Work-songs and Songs Used as Work-songs from the Great Days of Sail, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1961) p. 6. Shanty songs functioned to synchronize and thereby optimize labor, in what had then become larger vessels having smaller crews and operating on stricter schedules.Doerflinger, William Main, Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman, Mayerbooks (1990) pp. 96–7. The practice of singing shanties eventually became ubiquitous internationally and throughout the era of wind-driven packet and clipper ships.
Shanties had antecedents in the working chants of British and other national maritime traditions, such as those sung while manually loading vessels with cotton in ports of the southern United States. Shanty repertoire borrowed from the contemporary popular music enjoyed by sailors, including minstrel music, popular marches, and land-based folk songs, which were then adapted to suit musical forms matching the various labor tasks required to operate a sailing ship. Such tasks, which usually required a coordinated group effort in either a pulling or pushing action, included weighing anchor and setting sail.
The shanty genre was typified by flexible lyrical forms, which in practice provided for much improvisation and the ability to lengthen or shorten a song to match the circumstances. Its hallmark was call and response, performed between a soloist and the rest of the workers in chorus. The leader, called the shantyman, was appreciated for his piquant language, lyrical wit, and strong voice. Shanties were sung without instrumental accompaniment and, historically speaking, they were only sung in work-based rather than entertainment-oriented contexts. Although most prominent in English, shanties have been created in or translated into other European languages.
The switch to steam-powered ships and the use of machines for shipboard tasks by the end of the 19th century meant that shanties gradually ceased to serve a practical function. Their use as work songs became negligible in the first half of the 20th century. Information about shanties was preserved by veteran sailors and folklorist song-collectors, and their written and audio-recorded work provided resources that would later support a revival in singing shanties as a land-based leisure activity. Commercial musical recordings, popular literature, and other media, especially since the 1920s, have inspired interest in shanties among non-sailors. Contemporary performances of these songs range from the "traditional" style of maritime music to various modern music genres.
Word Etymology While the origin of the word "shanty" is uncertain, several inconclusive theories have been put forward.(For an overview of these theories, see: Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, pp. 22–23.) One of the earliest, most consistently offered and widely believed derivations is from the French , "to sing".e.g.: Hotten, John Camden, The Slang Dictionary, New edition, Chatto and Windus (1874) p. 284.
The phenomenon of using songs or chants, in some form, to accompany sea labor preceded the emergence of the term "shanty" in the historical record of the mid-19th century. One of the earliest published uses of this term for such a song came in G. E. Clark's Seven Years of a Sailor's Life, 1867.Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas, p. 20. Narrating a voyage in a clipper ship from Bombay to New York City in the early 1860s, Clark wrote, "The anchor came to the bow with the chanty of 'Oh, Riley, Oh,' and 'Carry me Long,' and the tug walked us toward the wharf at Brooklyn."Clark, George Edward, Seven Years of a Sailor's Life, Adams & Co. (1867) p. 165. While telling of another voyage out of Provincetown, Mass. in 1865, he wrote: Every man sprang to duty. The cheerful chanty was roared out, and heard above the howl of the gale. The cable held very hard, and when it surged over, the windlass sent the men flying about the deck, as if a galvanic battery had been applied to their hands. The vessel's head was often buried in the solid seas, and the men, soaked and sweating, yelled out hoarsely, "Paddy on the Railway", and "We're Homeward Bound", while they tugged at the brakes, and wound the long, hard cable in, inch by inch.Clark, Seven Years, p. 312. Additionally, Clark referred to a lead singer as a "chanty man", and he referred to stevedores unloading cargo from the vessels as "chanty men" and a "chanty gang".Clark, Seven Years, p. 41, 44.
This reference to singing stevedores as "chanty men" connects the genre to a still earlier reference to chanty-man as the foreman of a work gang and the lead singer of their songs. Around the late 1840s, Charles Nordhoff observed work gangs engaged in a type of labor called "cotton-screwing" in Mobile Bay. Characterized by Nordhoff as one of the heaviest sorts of labor, cotton-screwing involved the use of large jack-screws to compress and force cotton bales into the holds of outbound ships. Work gangs consisted of four men, who timed their exertions in turning the jack-screw to songs called chants. Singing, or chanting as it is called, is an invariable accompaniment to working in cotton, and many of the screw-gangs have an endless collection of songs, rough and uncouth, both in words and melody, but answering well the purposes of making all pull together, and enlivening the heavy toil. The foreman is the chanty-man, who sings the song, the gang only joining in the chorus, which comes in at the end of every line, and at the end of which again comes the pull at the screw handles ... The chants, as may be supposed, have more of rhyme than reason in them. The tunes are generally plaintive and monotonous, as are most of the capstan tunes of sailors, but resounding over the still waters of the Bay, they had a fine effect.Nordhoff, Charles, The Merchant Vessel, Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Co. (1855) pp. 40–1.
According to research published in the journal American Speech, Schreffler argues that chanty may have been a back derivation from chanty-man, which, further, initially carried the connotation of a singing stevedore (as in Nordhoff's account, above). The historical record shows shanty (and its variant spellings) gaining currency only in the late nineteenth century; the same repertoire was earlier referred to as "song", "chant", or "chaunt".Schreffler, Gibb. "The Execrable Term: A Contentious History of chanty". American Speech 92.4 (2017): 429-458. .
Spelling The spelling of the term appeared quite inconsistently until after the 1920s. While the above noted, American sources used a "ch" spelling, the next published appearances of the term, coming in two very similar articles from British publications from 1868 and 1869, used "shanty".Dallas, E. S., ed., "On Shanties", Once a Week 31 (1 Aug. 1868) pp. 92–3.Payn, James, ed., "Sailors' Shanties and Sea Songs", Chambers's Journal 4(311) (11 December 1869) pp. 794–6. Early writers who gave substantial due to the genre (i.e. those who were not mentioning shanties only in passing) often used the "ch" spelling, regardless of their nationality.e.g.: Davis, J. and Ferris Tozer, Sailor Songs or 'Chanties, Boosey & Co. (1887); Smith, Laura Alexandrine, The Music of the Waters, Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co. (1888); Bullen, Frank. T. and W.F. Arnold, Songs of Sea Labour, Orpheus Music Publishing (1914); Sharp, Cecil, English Folk-Chanteys, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. (1914); Robinson, Captain John, "Songs of the Chanty-Man: I-IV", The Bellman, 23(574–7) (14 July – 4 Aug. 1917).
Addressing the Royal Musical Association in 1915, English musicologist Richard Runciman Terry put forward his belief that the genre should be spelled with "sh" on the grounds that the spelling should correspond obviously to pronunciation.Terry, Richard Runciman, "Sea Songs and Shanties", Journal of the Royal Music Association 11(41) (1915) pp. 135–140. In his subsequent shanty collections he used this spelling consistently.Terry, Richard Runciman, The Shanty Book, Part I, J. Curwen & Sons (1921); The Shanty Book, Part II, J. Curwen & Sons (1926). American shanty-collector Joanna Colcord made great use of Terry's first book (corresponding with the author, and reprinting some of his material), and she, too, deemed it sensible to adopt the "sh" spelling for her 1924 collection.
Terry's works were the source for those among the earliest of commercial recordings (see below) and popular performances of shanties—especially because, unlike many earlier works, they provided scores with piano accompaniment and sufficiently long, performance-ready sets of lyrics. Colcord's work was also very handy in this regard and was used as a source by prominent British folk revival performers like A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl. Terry and Colcord's works were followed by numerous shanty collections and scores that also chose to use the "Sh" spelling,e.g.: Harris, S. Taylor, Six Sea Shanties, Boosey (1925); Sampson, John, The Seven Seas Shanty Book, Boosey (1927); Fox Smith, Cicely, A Book of Shanties, Methuen (1927). whereas others remained insistent that "ch" be retained to preserve what they believed to be the etymological origins of the term.Bone, David William, Capstan Bars, The Porpoise Press (1931). By the late 20th century, the "Sh" spelling had become the more or less standard one in Commonwealth English,e.g.: Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition (1989). whereas "ch" spellings remained in common use mostly in the United States.This is attested by its use by institutions such as maritime museums and the U.S. Library of Congress.
During the 1920s, the phrase came into regular use by lay commentators,e.g.: "Sea Chanteys Kept Alive. Sailors' Club in London is Collecting and Preserving the Old Songs of Sail", New York Times (7 Nov. 1926); Thomas, J.E., Lucy E. Broadwood, Frank Howes, and Frank Kidson, "Sea Shanties", Journal of the Folk-Song Society 8(32) (1928) pp. 96–100. though it was not documented in use by sailors themselves, nor has it been used by knowledgeable authors on the subject such as Stan Hugill. The term "sea shanty/chantey" has become a staple of popular usage, where it helps to disambiguate the work song genre from other meanings of the word "shanty". For example, the "ice fishing shanty", despite its reference to marine activity, is not related.
History and development Emergence