Songs of the Sea

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Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Brian Balogh: Now, picture a whaling ship out at sea in the middle of the 19th century. During the height of the whaling industry. As the crew worked together, pulling halyards to set sails or pumping the lever windless to set anchor, they sing a type of work song, called a work shanty.

Brian Balogh: (singing)

Brian Balogh: The voice you just heard is scholar Gibb Schreffler. He says sea shanties like Sally Brown were more than just catchy sailor songs. They were actually used to coordinate maritime labor tasks on merchant ships and whaling ships.

Gibb Schreffler: Shanties are always call and response songs. They always have a leader and a chorus. The chorus is performed by all of the crew aside from the leader, and the leader performs as a soloist. And what this means is that the chorus is a fixed part of the song. All of the crew must know that part of the song, so that they can come in and sing it together. However, what the leader or the caller sings is completely optional to his whim, and therefore it’s typically improvised.

Brian Balogh: So this sounds a little like those call and responses in the military, still used today. I hear the ROTC kids march by, and they do a kind of a call and response with the leader. Is there any relationship?

Gibb Schreffler: I believe that the shanty form, and I call it the shanty form because I think about over 90% of shanties have the same form. I believe that, that form is shared with the form of those same military songs you’re talking about. So for instance, a military song might be …

Gibb Schreffler: (singing).

Gibb Schreffler: That’s a two line verse, and that very same line of verse would fit into over 90% of shanties.

Brian Balogh: And what would the musical line be in a shanty? How would that differ if that were a shanty?

Gibb Schreffler: Well, the shanty form differs in that, whereas in that military song, the group of marching soldiers call back the exact line of the leader, whereas that’s the case in a shanty, the group sings back a different chorus. So, for example, the shanty Reuben Ranzo would go something like, “Oh poor old Ruben Ranzo.” And the chorus replies, “Ranzo boys, Ranzo.” And the lead singer says, “Oh poor old Ruben Ranzo.” And the chorus replies, “Ranzo boys Ranzo.”

Gibb Schreffler: And I can fit that military song in, “Oh I’ve got a dog, his name is Jack. Ranzo boys Ranzo. You can throw him a stick and he won’t bring it back, Ranzo boys Ranzo.”

Gibb Schreffler: It’s the way that the caller and the response are exactly evenly balanced in that way.

Brian Balogh: Yeah now that’s fascinating. Tell me about hierarchy here. Were the leaders superior in rank or did they just have better voices even if they were the lowest man on the totem pole to mix metaphors.

Gibb Schreffler: Sure, the leaders absolutely had no formal ranking, or higher or lower or otherwise than anyone else. They were the regular crew members. They came from the regular crew. It could of course be argued and it has been said, though with little documentation to really back it up, that the leader had a higher status perhaps in the eyes of his crewmates. But they were somebody who was considered to be a kind of man of words, somebody who was witty, somebody had the improvisational ability.

Brian Balogh: What were these sea shanties generally about? What were the topics? You want to share some of the lyrics with us.

Gibb Schreffler: There are oftentimes where themes of longing to be on the shore, if you weren’t on the shore.

Brian Balogh: That makes sense.

Gibb Schreffler: Or just typical, I guess if you could say typical working class popular song themes. Now there’s a third maybe one final category of lyrics that I’m not really sure what category you’d put them in to say what they’re about. Because these are lyrics that are characteristic of the popular African-American styled song at the time, which from some kind of literary analysis perspective may oftentimes appear to be nonsense. The bull frog is sitting on the rock and then possum jumped over the bull frog and sort of themes like that, which may often have some kind of deeper meeting encoded into them. But they sound like just things that rhyme.

Gibb Schreffler: Oftentimes more attention was paid to just the images and the sound of the rhyme than trying to create any particular thematic content, because shanties were not, hardly ever were they narrative. You didn’t try to sustain a story over several verses but each verse was a thought in itself.