Why sea shanties are the perfect working-from-home songs

Written by Steacy Easton.

When I was 12 or so, my dad took me to Washington, D.C., and in one of the Smithsonian Museums he found a 12-cassette set of sea shanties. Because my dad was an old-school folkie and a tad eccentric, I spent some of my childhood listening to those cassettes — and falling in love with sea shanties along the way. I've learned that their usefulness goes beyond the merchant sailing ships for which they were intended, and that they actually help with all kinds of work: typing, cleaning the kitchen, even walking to a meeting on time.

In the last two decades, sea shanties have had a few big moments: there were two compilation albums released in 2004 and 2006 called Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys with a tracklist including everyone from Nick Cave to Loudon Wainwright III to Keith Richards (a followup album, Son of Rogues Gallery, came out in 2013); the annual Great Yarmouth Maritime Festival in Norwich, U.K., which began in 2000 and whose regular shanty contests have grown in popularity; and the 2013 video game Assassin's Creed Black Flag that included a soundtrack full of sea shanties, many performed by Canadian musicians.

On top of that, numerous bands have consistently embraced the shanty over the years. Vancouver's the Dreadnaughts have adapted the sea shanty in a folk-punk style. Toronto's Pressgang Mutiny has been "roaring out songs of the sea" since 2013. And the Longest Johns, a folk band from Bristol, U.K., has released three albums of shanties in the last four years.

Now, the shanty wave has crested on the shores of TikTok.

One shanty in particular, "Wellerman," is having a moment — not just the Longest Johns' version, but especially the performance by Nathan Evans, a Scottish postal-worker-turned-TikTok-sensation with a strong baritone and an excellent sense of rhythm.

"Wellerman" is a whaling tune from New Zealand, and like most folk songs, it was written, distributed and eventually recorded by many different people. From the Longest Johns to folk musician Evans and onto viral fame, "Wellerman" hints that there might be something missing from how we think about music and work today.   

COVID-19 has taken labour, a traditionally communal pursuit, and isolated it. We now work mostly alone, and the delineation of home and work spaces has all but disappeared.

Designed to make manual work easier — labour that requires the body to move in a specific way, together with other workers — shanties make you feel less lonely and tell you when a task has started, and when it ends. I put on my shanty playlist when I have a hard time writing. Though it's not "hauling the bowline" (to quote another famous shanty), typing is work that has its own rhythms and singing work songs helps with that.

Shanties also exist for other kinds of work: for factory lines and farmhands, for prison laundries, felling trees, even cancelling stamps at a Ghanian post office.

The history of labour is contained in song, including the dangers of work. "Johnny Doyle," for example, tells of a lumber worker being dashed against the rocks. This is not a story with a sweet NFB cartoon connected to it. Songs sung by workers, for workers, are different from other historicized forms.

Though TikTok's format cuts shanties short, denying their formal complexity, the platform is helping renew this folk form through remixes and reshares.

Stan Rogers, the famed folk singer from Hamilton, Ont., who spent much time on the East Coast, also did his part in renewing the work song. (Thanks to TikTok, Spotify streams of Rogers' music have now spiked 250%.)

Rogers' "Barrett's Privateers" sounds like it was learnt through generations of kitchen parties, but was in fact written in 1977 and inspired by the Friends of Fiddler's Green at the Northern Lights Festival Boréal in Sudbury, Ont. If you sang the first line in taverns from White Rock to Bonaventure, the chorus would be sung back to you at top volume. Rogers knew the shanty needed to be updated for contemporary work. His comic work song "White Collar Holler," with its immortal chorus "I'm hauling up the data on the Xerox line," is an anthem for data workers everywhere.

Let's use this moment when shanties are in fashion to expand the form, taking "White Collar Holler" as an example. We need shanties for doing laundry, mopping the kitchen, doing Zoom calls and teaching kids at home. Shanties written by postal workers or people delivering groceries, describing a trip of a few blocks rather than an epic nautical voyage. Even shanties for warehouse workers, whose climbing and sorting is not that much different from the meticulous and tedious work of rigging on a merchant ship.

If this lockdown continues much longer, let's take up music that will make working through it less exhausting.