Channelknight Fadran

Y'all remember that old SU I made about how interesting Music Theory is?

And y'all remember that even older SU I made about how we need more Sea Shanties?

For some reason it hadn't even occurred to me that there's Sea Shanty Musical Theory.

It seems obvious now, but the whole reason they were "written" (that is to say, invented and carried out orally) in the first place was to coordinate their work. Musical beats are pretty much the most intuitive method of keeping time without any fancy stopwatches, which means it's pretty much the best way to do it if you happened to exist in the several thousand years before we figured out how to mass-produce easily-accessible timepieces.

So what do you do when you all need to hoist at the ropes simultaneously? What's the best way to coordinate when you put a good ol' heave into the work? Music.

Rule One is that Sea Shanties are work songs: you need a clear beat to heave your ropes and row your oars to. There are a couple distinct types of shanties that you can work with:

• Long-Drag: Otherwise known as a Halyard Shanty (which is metal as hell), which have prolonged sections for - get this - when you need to be doing long pulls on the ropes. "Hangin' Johnny" is a solid example of this.
• Short-Drag: Otherwise known as a Forsheet or Mainsheet Shanty (one of which is metal as hell), which have shorter, burstier beats. "Haul Away, Joe" is a really popular example.
• There are others, but they all kinda fall under those two categories.

Rule two is that the general form of a Sea Shanty is that of the basic Call-and-Response technique, which is this case is very literal as there's often a lead who starts the line and the workers who finish it - for example:

• Lead: I thought I heard the Old Man say
• Refrain: "Leave her, Johnny, leave her"
• Lead: Tomorrow ye will get your pay
• Refrain: And it's time for us to leave her

Rule three is that your chorus has pretty much got to repeat itself, which basically means you can stack as many verses as you want and keep people in the beat so as long as they know half of it.

• Leave her, Johnny, leave her
• Oh, leave her, Johnny, leave her
• For the voyage is long and the winds don't blow
• And it's time for us to leave her

Past that there aren't really any rules for shanties that I can find. Common themes seem to follow an energetic yet kinda somber tone - like, you can bop to it, but it's still chill.

Did sailors invent LoFi? I think sailors invented LoFi.

Here's a bunch of shanties I listened to for research:

What about the Wellerman? Drunken Sailor?

These two are probably the most popular shanties in modern media, which is good because they're both bangers. Drunken Sailor dates back to the 1820s as the earliest, which means it was about in the same eras as all those other songs I rated pretty highly.

The Wellerman was written in 1970, which might leave a bad taste in your mouth but is actually just the byproduct of sea shanties regaining popular after the ultimately fell off in the early 1900s - it wasn't until the late 40s that they started coming back on, and thank goodness for that. I don't usually approve of TikTok trends, but thank you Nathan Evans for bringing this sudden influx in Shanty popularity.

So basically: if you're into writing songs, you should try your hand at Sea Shanties! They're awesome, and we deserve more of them.