When future historians looking back on the early weeks of 2021, they may have been left scratching their heads at one cultural movement that is not easy to see: the revival of marine shanties.
“Shanties,” as they were traditionally called, are songs sung by sailors to the rhythm of their work on board merchant ships. But today you’ll find them sung by all sorts of people on the TikTok video sharing app, where the sea tunes have become a viral wonder unlikely to have inspired the hashtag #ShantyTok .
This began in late December, when a Scottish postal worker named Nathan Evans posted an old New Zealand whale song, “Soon the Wellerman is coming.” Using the TikTok duet feature, others joined in with Mr. Evans, adding vocals and backing vocals. Since then, videos tagged with #seashanty have garnered more than three billion views, and online searches for “sea shanties” have skyrocketed, according to Google Trends.
Historically, “shanty” has been spelled “chanty” or “chantey,” going back to the earliest times of its appearance in print in the mid-19th century. These spellings suggest a connection with the French word “chanter” meaning “sing,” or especially the essential form of the verb, “chantez.” The nickname “shanty” may have influenced a nickname referring to a rawly constructed wooden shelter (unrelated to the other “shanty”, but also rooted in French ).
In a memoir in 1856, journalist Charles Nordhoff described as a young man he saw work parties of mostly English and Irish sailors in Mobile Bay, off the coast of Alabama, moving cotton bales into boats. vessels. The staff kept the rhythm with “songs, rough and mouthless”: “The bailiff is the singer, who sings the song, the gang only joins the chorus. ”