Sea Shanty TikTok Meme, Explained

Within the last week of 2020, Nathan Evans, a 26-year-old Scottish postman and aspiring musician, shared a video of himself on TikTok, singing a sea shanty known as “Quickly Could the Wellerman Come.” He wasn’t anticipating something to occur, however the app has a approach of turning dusty esoterica into viral gold.

Certainly, during the last two weeks, his old-timey video has been shared and duetted 1000’s of instances: by skilled vocalists and instrumentalists, maritime fans, digital beatmakers, memers, a Kermit the Frog puppet, and extra.

“If it wasn’t for TikTok, I might be so bored and claustrophobic,” Mr. Evans stated by way of Zoom. “But it surely can provide you a way of getting a gaggle. You possibly can collaborate with different individuals and make mates so simply.”

What Is a Sea Shanty?

One of many authentic functions of the ocean shanty was to create a way of neighborhood and shared goal. On service provider marine vessels within the 1700s and 1800s, a shantyman would lead sailors in tune as they labored, distracting them from their toil, enlivening their duties and establishing a rhythm.

“The totally different sorts of onboard work and chores would have totally different shanties hooked up to them,” stated Gerry Smyth, a professor of Irish cultural historical past at Liverpool John Moores College and the writer of “Sailor Music: The Shanties and Ballads of the Excessive Seas.”

In line with Mr. Smyth’s analysis, shanties advanced to match and expedite specific duties. “For those who have been hauling sail, for instance, the shanty was designed across the bodily effort required to realize that,” he stated. “Everyone would pull on the similar time,” he added, cued by the rhythm of the tune.

The earliest sea shanties may very well be as outdated as seafaring itself. They faucet into the story-sharing impulse of oral literature, which is even older nonetheless.

Singing is enjoyable, and it lifted the sailors’ spirits, Mr. Smyth stated. The songs additionally provided a standard language for multinational crews.

“This communitarian aesthetic, it actually does return to a really historical time,” Mr. Smyth stated. “After we’re sitting across the campfire, we’re speaking concerning the hunt. We obtain id by neighborhood, by the underlying beat on the drum.” In these historical storytelling traditions, everybody knew the story and performed an element in telling it.

Different working songs have run on the identical shared storytelling impulse. That is particularly obvious within the call-and-response custom of African-American folks songs and spirituals, which drew on the democratic participation practices of sub-Saharan public life.

For sea shanties, the passage of time has led to some revision. Within the Victorian and Edwardian eras, students amassing sea shanties cleaned up the lyrics, quite a lot of which have been fairly “bawdy,” Mr. Smyth stated. These collectors bowdlerized the songs, changing “whores” with “truthful maidens,” eradicating coarse language and firming down drunken nights on the pub.

Within the variations that remained truest to the sailors’ lives and language, these ballads targeted on what Mr. Smyth calls “the elemental coordinates of the shanty creativeness”: arriving in port and returning to the ocean. Out within the huge blue, they discovered a romanticized lifetime of toil and violence. Again on dry land, their yarns starred pimps, prostitutes and inebriated seamen shedding their wages on the bar and in back-alley cube video games.

About That Shanty

The lately popularized “Quickly Could the Wellerman Come” — which the band the Longest Johns lined in 2018 — leaves out such naughty narratives in favor of a “Moby-Dick”-like whaling journey. Its topic was actual: the Weller brothers’ whaling firm owned an outpost in Otago, New Zealand. The tune lyrics characteristic sailors harpooning a whale and hoisting it to the ship for butchery.

“This nicely may have been a cutting-in shanty,” or a tune that males sung whereas they slaughtered a whale, stated Michael P. Dyer, the maritime curator on the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.

That specific activity was messy; the harvesting of whale elements — oil to gentle lamps and use in cosmetics, baleen for whalebone corsets, tongue for meals — was exhausting labor. The “tonguing” that’s talked about in lyrics refers to eradicating the tongue, probably the most edible a part of the whale, in accordance with Mr. Dyer.

As for the road “to deliver us sugar and tea and rum,” some consider that it could check with whaling’s half within the triangle slave commerce of the Atlantic. (Accordingly, numerous commenters steered that the meme had misplaced its allure.) Others consider the phrase refers to a different ship coming to resupply the whalers on their lengthy hunt.

“‘Wellerman’ isn’t actually a shanty,” stated David Coffin, a folks musician and music educator in Cambridge, Mass. It’s a whaling tune with the beat of a shanty, he stated, however its goal is that of a ballad — to inform a narrative, to not assist sailors hold time.

In any case, the shape, Mr. Smyth stated, is malleable, which may clarify the 1000’s of riffs, duets and diversifications which have proliferated on-line. Some individuals have even begun masking common songs — like “All Star,” by Smash Mouth — in a sea-shanty cadence.

“It’s not the fantastic thing about the tune that will get individuals,” Mr. Coffin stated. “It’s the vitality.”

“That’s one of many issues I like about sea shanties,” he added. “The accessibility. You don’t should be a skilled singer to sing on it. You’re not purported to sing fairly.”