Sea Chanties and the West African Paradigm

Brian Balogh: I want to return to our discussion of sea shanties. Earlier in the episode we learned about how they were used to coordinate labor tasks, and we heard an example of a typical work song. Today many people assume that shanties have an English heritage. But according to scholars Gib Schreffler sea shanties can be traced back to the 1830s originating from African-American music, and borrowing heavily from popular minstrel songs at the time.

Nathan Connolly: Also a quick warning to parents with children listening. Brian attempts to sing a shanty at the end of the segment. This may be a good time to cover their sensitive ears.

Gibb Schreffler: Well I do as I believe that shanty is as genre is a music. I believe that was a genre that emerged in the Americas, more specifically in what we could call the African diaspora of the Western Atlantic. So I would include the United States along with other countries of the Caribbean, and then this kind of black Atlantic world. The genre emerges there, and it’s in the paradigm I would say of West African song in which, I was about to say work song but again I want to be careful. It’s not only for work specifically, but it’s a paradigm in which the practice is to embed song in physical action. Whether that’s in a play action, a dance action or whether it’s a work action.

Gibb Schreffler: The song doesn’t necessarily exist as a separate entity in itself, but it’s a vocalization, a sound that you make within another activity where you’re you’re moving your body in some way. And this paradigm I believe was carried with Africans to the New World, and was re-imagined in what came to be African-American music. And African-Americans use this type of genre. Shanty was not the only form, there was more than one type of work song form. But they used them in various working context across the whole network of African-American life. All the way from the deepest plantations from there down river, into the seaports and then eventually onto the ships.

Brian Balogh: When would you place that time wise? I don’t mean a specific day but roughly which decades or what periods of American history in this case?

Gibb Schreffler: About the second half of the 1830s was when a very notable context emerged for multiracial labor. Wherein white workers entered what could have been considered up to that point a black labor context, and that was the context of loading cotton aboard ships and ports of the Gulf and the United States. I believe that was the time period when as it turned out this labor of loading cotton was one of if not the best paid labors you could do on shore, best paid manual labor. It was a coveted profession, and many local white Americans as well as many immigrants from Ireland and Germany especially had been coming at the time we’re entering this profession in number.

Gibb Schreffler: That’s about when I think we can start to narrow down. And then we start to see accounts after that of these immigrants had come on ship, and then they worked for a season because cotton loading was a seasonal profession. When that season is done, they go back onto a ship and become sailors and we read of people on the ship saying, “Wow this crew that we have is excellent. These are the guys who work loading cotton in one season, and now they’re back on the ship, and they can set all the sails with all these songs and very efficiently, and they work very hard.

Brian Balogh: Could you talk to me a little bit about the connection between sea shanties and minstrel.

Gibb Schreffler: The development of the shanty genre was happening at precisely the same time as the blackface minstrel genre of music was developing in the United States. We know that the minstrel music was at that time the middle of the 19th century I’m talking about. Kind of starting in the 1830s, having its first peak actually in a year. We can pinpoint 1843 and then continuing from there the minstrel genre was the most popular genre of music in the United States, and eventually spread globally. And this would have been popular music with all of the sailors. Whether the sailors were white or black, they were interested in this type of music. It was the popular music.

Gibb Schreffler: I think we need to throw aside the notion that sailors on their ships would have a sang what they would have considered to be traditional songs. They weren’t necessarily interested in singing old songs, they were interested in the music they liked, so it was music that was current to them. And the current popular music by all accounts was minstrel music. Then we know that the sailors on their off duty time when they weren’t working their entertainment music in this period was largely made up of minstrel music as well, which they would recreate with the instruments like the banjo and the fiddle and the tambourine.

Gibb Schreffler: We also know that when sailors got to port for entertainment they would head to a theater and maybe see a performance of minstrel music. Now, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about minstrel music. What resonates with us in hindsight is the racist nature of the genre, and there’s no discounting of that, and there’s no … we shouldn’t yield any ground to the fact that that was part of the minstrel genre. But it’s interesting as well to consider that at the time minstrel music was starting to develop, this was for many white Americans, it was their first exposure to something like Black American musical style.

Gibb Schreffler: And this was a style that caught on like wildfire amongst white Americans. And the ear;ier minstrel music perhaps more than many people realize, probably was a good reflection of African American musical style. Now that range of a spectrum you could have a really awful interpretation or you could have quite a good one. But in general it was in the ballpark of what could be identified as an African American musical style, and thus I think it made African-American musical characteristics familiar to a very, very large audience and made them popular.

Gibb Schreffler: By this point the mid 19th century Americans generally, if we could say that, and then soon the whole world was becoming more familiar with the characteristics of African-American musical style. This made the reception of shanties that much easier since they were also an African-American musical style. I’ll just conclude by giving you a close comparison between one minstrel song that’s very familiar, and the shanty form, and perhaps one of the most famous minstrel songs was Steven Foster’s, “De Camptown Races” published in 1950.

Gibb Schreffler: And of course that’s the song that goes, “De Camptown ladies sing dis song—Doo-dah! doo-dah! De Camp-town race-track five miles long—Oh! doo-dah day!” Now that song is in the exact form of a shanty, I could say the halyard shanty. The one used to haul on the lines that raise the sales. Doo-dah, doo-dah. Those are two pulls. Doo-dah is the first one, the second doo-dah is your second pull. And then that’s your first chorus, and then you have a second Chorus “Oh, doo-dah day. On “oh” you would pull and on “day” you would pull. And that’s exactly like I could sing Ranzo boys Ranzo as I sang earlier.

Gibb Schreffler: I could sing my Reuben Ranzo and go, “Oh the camp town ladies sing this song, Ranzo boys Ranzo. The camptown racetrack five miles long, Ranzo boys Ranzo.” I believe the minstrel songs had that form, because they emerged more or less from African-American musical style, and the shanties also came from that origin. So they happened to have the same lyrical form, and the shanties singers borrowed from minstrel song lyrics all the time.

Brian Balogh: I’ve always associated sea shanties with English heritage. In my case specifically Benjamin Britten. But I couldn’t be the only one who assumes that the heritage of sea shanties are Anglo-american white. How did we get so off track?

Gibb Schreffler: Well in the 19th century the writers about shanties did not think that they were English or British primarily. In fact British writers commented on the genre, and said, “Look at these songs, look at their lyrics, what they’re singing about. They have the absolute aroma of the Americas to them.” And American writers would look at them and say these songs have the sound of black American music. But in the early 20th there emerged the rather new phenomenon of academic folklore.

Brian Balogh: Oh come on, don’t tell me the answer to this is academics screwing up again, come on Gibb.

Gibb Schreffler: Well you have a cohort of English folklorists. They’re very enamored with the idea of folk, and they’re developing theoretically the idea of this word folk which had not been in great usage up to that point. And they’re thinking about it in these ways like, well folk speaks to the true essence of a people. It’s kind of what’s inside of you, it comes with you as a people not as a culture that any people could learn, but it’s almost in your DNA. And we could recover the English spirit in the English people if we can recover kind of our true essence of the folk of the past. And people looking at shanties on one hand were looking for a specific thing, so they had their sort of confirmation bias.

Gibb Schreffler: They wanted to pure folk essence so they were rejecting any kind of popular musical source. They already had their idea in mind that it was English, so they’re being highly selective in the material, and presenting that and shaping it to fit the narrative that they had.

Brian Balogh: Well we’re gonna do a call in response right now. You ready?

Gibb Schreffler: Okay.

Brian Balogh: I just learned a deeply cool thing.

Gibb Schreffler: I just learned a deeply cool thing.

Brian Balogh: You just made the story ring.

Gibb Schreffler: You just made the story ring.

Brian Balogh: That’s all I got Gibb. Thank you so much for joining us on Backstory.

Gibb Schreffler: My pleasure.

Brian Balogh: Gibb Schreffler is Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College. (music)