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| Songs of the Sea |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
21 April 2007
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I noticed the other day that sea shanties
have been said to show an African influence, that they are part
of the musical legacy of the slave trade. The thought was both
surprising and convincing. I have always associated sea shanties
with the folk-song revival and with a kind of English nationalism
and naval nostalgia - although a moment's thought tells one
that many of them are less to do with England than with America.
We never hear shanties sung as they were supposed
to be sung, since they are work songs devised to accompany and
facilitate specific tasks on board the sailing ships: there
were capstan shanties, pumping shanties, windlass shanties and
so on. Even in the great days of sail, we are told, they were
only sung when these tasks were being performed.
When we hear sea shanties today, they are almost
certainly bowdlerised, most likely arranged to suit a choir
and therefore quite possibly harmonised in an attempt to elevate
their musical quality. What comes across as characteristic of
a sea shanty, a haunting melody as in, for instance, "Blow
the Man Down", must surely bear only a distant resemblance
to the original.
To make a song into a shanty, a work song,
involved distributing its lines as verses and responses, the
lines alternating between the shanty-man and the rest of the
crew, and the accents perhaps corresponding to the physical
activity involved - pulling a rope, say, or raising a sail.
This arrangement is very like much African music and the kind
of singing associated with camp meetings or religious revivals
that began in America in the early 19th century.
However, it cannot be the case that this kind
of work song derives from the slave trade. For it is surely
something ancient and universal, to mark the effort of communal
work by singing. The mariners on a Venetian galley in the 15th
century sang, and there was "a concert between one who
sings out orders and the labourers who sing in response".
The earliest work giving actual shanty verses, according to
Stan Hugill, is The Complaynt of Scotland (1549). It is hard
to know what to make of an example of a bowline shanty from
this work:
Hou, hou, pulpela, pulpela,
Boulena, boulena,
Darta, darta,
Hard out strif.
Hugill, who wrote several books on the subject,
collected a single remaining example of an Anglo-Hindi shanty
in Trinidad, deriving from the trade of indentured labour between
Calcutta and the West Indies:
Ke, ke, ke, ke, Ekidumah!
Somerset a-killa coolie man, Ekidumah!
Somerset a-killa wire fall, Ekidumah!
Somerset a-killa bosun's mate, Ekidumah!
And he tells us that there were many songs
of African-American and Latin mixture, around southern Mexico
and British Honduras:
A de hala hombre poquito mas,
Down below for rolling go!
And:
Chyrra me Yankee, chyrra me rao,
What's de matta de loggin' no go?
Hugill points out that there are Irish/Negro
shanties that have Irish airs and what he calls Negro words,
although he does not, in the book I am reading (Shanties and
Sailors' Songs), give the text of either. You can understand
why:
I nebber see de like since I been born,
When a big buck nigger wid his sea boots on
Says "Johnny come down to Hilo,
Poor old man!"
Chorus:
Oh! Wake her, Oh! Shake her,
Oh! Wake dat girl wid de blue dress on!
When Johnny comes down to Hilo,
Poor old man!
And in another version of this windlass and
capstan shanty, the "big buck nigger" turns into an
"Arkansas farmer".
This mixing of Irish and black idiom, Spanish,
Hindi and so on, is to be expected as an outcome from multiracial
crews. In the early 19th century, there was a system of "chequerboard
watches" on the sugar-droghers out of Liverpool, Glasgow
and Bristol. All ships had two watches, port and starboard,
and if the port was made up of whites, the starboard would consist
of black seamen. "And I must say," wrote Hugill in
1969, "with modern colour problems in mind, they got on
very well together indeed."
Carl Sandburg produced a magnificent folk anthology
in 1927, The American Songbag, which contains, among many items,
what he called "one of the few known work songs of the
slave days of the American Negro". This is it:
Heave away, heave away!
I'd rather court a yellow gal
Than work for Henry Clay,
Heave away, heave away!
Yellow gal, I want to go.
I'd rather court a yellow gal
Than work for Henry Clay!
Heave away! Yellow gal, I want to go!
The shanties were often offensive in their
day, and the singing of them was forbidden by the more pious
or upright ship masters. And they were bowdlerised in their
day as well, when the ship's passengers got in the habit of
gathering around the men to listen to their songs.
But the great thing to understand is the way
they relate to work: "Now this song," says a singer
recorded in 1939, "it commences ... The solo is sung by
the shantyman sitting on the capstan head ... The shantyman
sits there and does nothing, while the crew, walking around
the capstan, are singing." The interviewer asks the singer
where the pull comes. The singer doesn't understand. "And
that's where they pull?" repeats the interviewer. "There's
no pull in a capstan shanty!" says the singer: "They're
walking around the capstan with the bars." In other words,
they are pushing continuously, and that fact will be somehow
reflected in the song.
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