Why Did Sailors Sing While They Worked? Rhythm for Hauling

Working a large sailing ship required groups of people to apply force together, since a rope that six people pull at slightly different moments barely moves and one they pull simultaneously moves a great deal. Coordinating that without a common signal is surprisingly hard, and a song solves it, since everybody knows where the beat falls and the effort lands on a predictable syllable. A designated singer, the shantyman, led the verses while the crew joined the responses, and the pull came on the response. The singer was chosen for lung power and for the ability to improvise verses, and being good at it was a recognised and valued skill that could excuse a sailor from some of the hauling itself.

The form of a song followed the motion it accompanied:

• •Short haul songs, for a few hard pulls, with the effort on one or two syllables
• •Halyard songs, for repeated hauling with pauses, hoisting yards up the mast
• •Capstan songs, smooth and continuous, for walking round a winch raising the anchor
• •Pumping songs, for the steady repetitive work of clearing water from the bilge
• •Windlass songs, similar to capstan songs and used on smaller vessels
• •Forecastle songs, sung for pleasure off duty, which are not working songs at all

The repertoire is a mixture assembled from everything the crews had heard, which reflects who the crews were. Merchant ships in the nineteenth century carried men of many nationalities, and the songs absorbed material from British and Irish traditional song, from American popular song of the period, and very substantially from the work songs of Black labourers in the southern United States and the Caribbean, particularly the cotton screwing gangs who loaded bales in port and whose call and response style shaped the genre directly. Several well-known examples can be traced to specific earlier songs. The tradition was fluid rather than fixed, with verses improvised, borrowed and adapted constantly, so no version of any of these songs is authoritative.

The subject matter is narrower than the romantic image suggests and says a good deal about the life. Departure and return dominate, with a great many songs built around leaving a port, naming the places passed and anticipating arrival, which suited work that lasted for months. Women appear constantly, usually as someone waiting or someone encountered ashore, and the tone ranges from tender to extremely coarse, with collectors bowdlerising freely and leaving a sanitised record. Complaints about the food, the pay and the officers are common and were tolerated in song in a way they would not have been in speech, which made the form a recognised outlet. Nonsense choruses carry many of the songs, since the words of a response matter far less than its shape and its predictability.

Steam power removed the need for coordinated hauling and the working tradition largely ended with sail, and the songs did not disappear. Collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recorded them from surviving sailors, which preserved a repertoire that would otherwise have gone. The folk revival of the mid twentieth century took them up as performance pieces, and clubs and festivals have sustained them since. A viral episode in early 2021, when one Scottish song spread through a video platform and attracted enormous numbers of layered amateur performances, introduced the genre to an audience that had no connection to it at all, and it did so on precisely the quality that made the songs work originally, which is that they are built for many people to join.

These were tools for making a crew pull at the same instant, with a leader singing verses and the crew answering on the beat where the effort landed. The form of each song matched the motion of the job, from short hard pulls to the steady walk around a capstan. The repertoire drew heavily on Black American and Caribbean work songs, and it outlived the ships through collectors and revivals.