How the world has discovered sea shanties
These are challenging days, my friends, with plague surging everywhere but here, and civil war seeming to loom to our south.
It can be hard to keep the spirits aloft when every spare second, your eyes are drawn to the cellphone where nothing good awaits.
Which is why I want to tell you about shantytok, Tiktok's stream of sea shanty videos that, as USA Today reported Wednesday, “are taking over social media.”
The best and easiest way to understand why is just to go online and have a look.
There, for example, you will see a Scottish Tiktoker named Nathan Evans, beating 4-4 time with a hand while belting out The Wellerman, a 19th century New Zealand shanty, about how “there once was a ship that put to sea/the name of the ship was the Billy of Tea” and how that trip ended, shall we say, unfortunately.
That video, which dropped on December, blew up. So did the sea shanty Tiktok after that, and the one after that.
Those rousing, rollicking sailor's work songs have spread to other social media platforms. People are piling on, adding their own voices, and instruments, in wonderful new ways.
The listeners and creators, meanwhile, aren't necessarily grizzled old salts.
They might be young, urban and professional. They might never have downed a flagon of rum, or stood on a deck in choppy seas. They might not know a halyard from a capstan.
It is just coincidence that Netflix's list of current movie choices includes Fisherman's Friends, about shanty singing Cornish fishermen.
But there's no denying that a form of folk music that every Atlantic Canadian grew up with is having a genuine moment.
“Of all the Tiktok trends to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Variety, the American entertainment industry bible, opines, “this one may prove to be the most bizarre — but also the most delightfully wholesome.”
Séan Mccann, the Newfoundland singer and songwriter, doesn't find it remotely bizarre.
While a member of the iconic folk-rock band Great Big Sea, he was known as the Shantyman, because of his facility singing the old songs. It, by the way, will also be the name of his upcoming solo album, set to include the kinds of sea songs that are now an internet sensation.
“Historically sea shanties come and go, like the ocean,” said Mccann, who studied folklore at Memorial University.
They began as songs of labour for sailors, many of whom had been press-ganged into the sea-going life. The initial idea was to ensure the crewmen worked together, and efficiently.
Somewhere along the line, he said, these songs provided an opportunity for the singers to speak out against their enemies, and gave common men the voice of protest.
Their timelessness, therefore, is rooted in their universal subject matter, the sea, and their power: they make a person “more able for the job.”
No surprise, then, that shanties tend to rise in popularity “during times of duress, and pressure,” Mccann said, “when life is hard.”
Which explains why these songs are having a resurgence now, at a time when the pandemic is showing no signs of abating, and the United States has emerged as a fractured country.
This part of the country always understood their power. Just ask Eric Ruff, who for the past 34 years has been a member of the Yarmouth Shantymen, who perform songs from the golden age of sailing ships, when their hometown was at its peak.
The group started modestly enough when Ruff, then the curator of the Yarmouth County Museum, was asked to give a lecture on sea shanties.
He hoped to illustrate his talk by performing a couple of them. Not wanting to do so by himself, he recruited a few friends with decent singing pipes from the local community.
“It started as a one-night stand, but we're still going.” he said.
It's been hard for the last year, when the group has been unable to meet in Ruff's 250-year-old house, a few blocks from what was once one of the busiest harbours in the country, to practice.
Yet, as the world is discovering, there's something irresistible about the music, with its call and response phrasing, its easy sing-ability, and its historic resonance,
“You're making me envious,” Ruff said Wednesday about all the sea shanty talk.
Some day soon they'll be back together again, he vowed, singing songs that just now, because they are needed, are being rediscovered.