Shanty Tok… and Material Culture?

By Kelly Fu, ’22

Who hasn’t heard the Wellerman shanty by this point? And who hasn’t, after that initial encounter, looped the song a dozen times more? Sea shanties, especially in the form of Nathan Evans’ viral rendition of “Wellerman” on TikTok, are taking the internet by storm. The prediction has dropped that sea shanties will be the defining musical genre of 2021. While I, being a long-time lover and performer of folk music, am elated that shanties are finally getting their moment in the sun, the question remains: why did shanties all of a sudden gain such a following?

The most obvious answer is that shanties’ ability to traverse cultural boundaries, both as spontaneous working songs in the eighteenth century and as staged TikTok performances today, call attention to the ability of art to connect humans across cultures with astounding efficiency. Although Nathan Evans, who started the original video, is Scottish, the viral Wellerman chorus was made up of artists of all races and origins from all over the English speaking world. The multicultural shanty singers of 2021 echo the motley crew who sung shanties onboard eighteenth century clipper ships: scholars have long studied the multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual sailors that served in the early modern British navy. The power of shanties, of art, in uniting and orchestrating a labor aboard a naval fleet gives us a boost of confidence for the vision of an entangled globe that has been proven all too fragile by the events of this past year.

A less obvious answer lies in shanties’ inextricable roots in labor, in movement, and in teamwork, and our world, in which labor often feels empty and lacking. Sea shanties are songs that have the rhythm of team labor woven into their very musical construction. The marching 2/2 rhythm of the sea shanties is arguably the very feature that makes the sea shanty genre so catchy. I myself have never been able to listen to Nathan Evans (@nathanevanss)’s viral shantytok videos without thumping my fist along to his song. This catchy rhythm, other than facilitating the song’s viral spread on the internet, mirrors the listener’s heartbeat, prompting them to follow along and perpetuate the pulsing beats. This made sense in the original context of the sea shanty tradition: replicated by a naval crew at work, the singing of sea shanties in unison is meant to help crew members dispersed throughout a ship to synchronize to each other’s pace of labor. While shouting at your shipmates to speed up or slow down may be very energy inefficient on a large ship breaking across a roaring sea, loud, rhythmic singing in unison prompts sailors to sync up what they were doing with their hands with what they were vocalizing. Perhaps the sudden enthusiasm for songs that are not only about labor but that also make manifest the performance of labor reflects a deep yearning for a 2021 where we can labor, and feel physically manifest our hard work.

What, then, do shanties have to do with material culture? While the auditory component of material culture is often overshadowed by the tyranny of an object’s visuality, work songs have long been central to the processes of artisanal manual production. Just like the sailors who adjust their speed of labor to the plodding beats of the sea shanties, artisans from the early modern period have used music to gage the sensitive timing in their processes of production. Songs were used to keep spirits up while performing backbreaking labor. Gaelic waulking songs, a particularly fertile genre, were sung by women to accompany the monotonous and long processes of walking, or the forceful slapping down of large bundles of wool to dislodge dirt. Incantation of familiar songs can be used to time sensitive craft procedures. European artisans have been using the Ave Maria to time metallurgical processes since the late middle ages.

Songs whose musical form mimicked the task at hand may have informed the haptic feedback between the artisan’s hand and the crafted material, shaping the manufactured object in turn. An Irish spinning song that I learned from musicians in South Sligo had a cascading melody that cycled through a major chord progression in a looping, consistent rhythm, with ornaments evenly dispersed throughout each musical phrase. The smoothly progressing melody mirrored the delicate but consistent pressure applied to the yarn being spun. The even distribution of vocal ornaments may have helped the singers with consistent breath control, helping to generate smoother movements which in turn resulted in yarn of a uniform thickness. The spinning song can also be sung as a loop, which further allows it to be stretched out, repeated, sung with canon variations to fill the variable time of spinning.