Emergence Singing or chanting has been done to accompany labor on seagoing vessels among various cultural groups at various times and in various places. A reference to what seems to be a sailor's hauling chant in
The Complaynt of Scotland (1549) is a popularly cited example. Liberal use of the word "shanty" by folklorists of the 20th century expanded the term's conceptual scope to include "sea-related work songs" in general. However, the shanty genre is distinct among various global work song phenomena. Its formal characteristics, specific manner of use, and repertoire cohere to form a picture of a work song genre that emerged in the Atlantic merchant trade of the early 19th century. As original work songs, shanties flourished during a period of about fifty years.
Work chants and "sing-outs" There is a notable lack of historical references to anything like shanties, as they would come to be known, in the entirety of the 18th century. In the second half of the 18th century, English and French sailors were using simple chants to coordinate a few shipboard tasks that required unanimous effort. A dictionary of maritime terms, in describing the anchor-hauling mechanical device known as a
windlass, noted the use of such a chant. This particular old-fashioned style of windlass was one that required workers to continually remove and re-insert "handspikes" (wooden leverage bars) into the device to turn its gears. It requires, however, some dexterity and address to manage the handspec to the greatest advantage; and to perform this the sailors must all rise at once upon the windlass, and, fixing their bars therein, give a sudden jerk at the same instant, in which movement they are regulated by a sort of song or howl pronounced by one of their number. Rather than the well-developed songs that characterize shanties, this "howl" and others were evidently structured as simple chants in the manner of "1, 2,
3!" The same dictionary noted that French sailors said just that, and gave some indication what an English windlass chant may have been like:
UN, deux, troi, an exclamation, or song, used by seamen when hauling the bowlines, the greatest effort being made at the last word. English sailors, in the same manner, call out on this occasion,—haul-in—haul-two—haul-belay! Such simple or brief chants survived into the 19th century. First-hand observers such as Frederick Pease Harlow, a sailor of the 1870s, attested to their ubiquity, saying that they were brought into use whenever a brief task required one. In historical hindsight these items have come to be generically called "sing-outs"; yet even before the known advent of the term
shanty,
Richard Henry Dana referred to "singing out". The wind was whistling through the rigging, loose ropes flying about; loud and, to me, unintelligible orders constantly given and rapidly executed, and the sailors "singing out" at the ropes in their hoarse and peculiar strains. Later writers distinguished such chants and "sing-outs" from shanties proper, but in the case of relatively "simple" shanties—such as those for hauling sheets and tacks (see below)—there is a grey area. This has led some to believe that the more sophisticated shanties of later years developed from the more primitive chants.
Early British and Anglo-American sailor work songs A step up in sophistication from the sing-outs was represented by the first widely established sailors' work song of the 19th century, "Cheer'ly Man". Although other work-chants were evidently too variable, non-descript, or incidental to receive titles, "Cheer'ly Man" appears referred to by name several times in the early part of the century, and it lived on alongside later-styled shanties to be remembered even by sailors recorded by
James Madison Carpenter in the 1920s. "Cheer'ly Man" makes notable appearances in the work of both Dana (sea experience 1834–36) and
Herman Melville (sea experience 1841–42). When we came to mast-head the top-sail yards, with all hands at the halyards, we struck up "Cheerily, men," with a chorus which might have been heard half way to Staten Land. The decks were all life and commotion; the sailors on the forecastle singing, "Ho, cheerly men!" as they catted the anchor; Although "Cheer'ly Man" could be considered more "developed" than the average sing-out, in its form it is yet different from the majority of shanties that are known to us today, suggesting that it belonged to an earlier stage of sailors' songs that preceded the emergence of "modern" shanties. Detailed reference to shipboard practices that correspond to shanty-singing was extremely rare before the 1830s. In the first place, singing while working was generally limited to merchant ships, not war ships. The
Royal Navy banned singing during work—it was thought the noise would make it harder for the crew to hear commands—though
capstan work was accompanied by the
bosun's pipe, or else by fife and drum or fiddle. A writer from the 1830s made this clear: , from
The Quid (1832) On board a well-disciplined
man-of-war, no person except the officers is allowed to speak during the performance of the various evolutions. When a great many men are employed together, a fifer or a fiddler usually plays some of their favourite tunes; and it is quite delightful to see the glee with which Jack will "stamp and go", keeping exact time to "Jack's the lad", or the "College Hornpipe". Fife and fiddle were also used, in earlier times, for work aboard merchant vessels. One of the earliest references to shanty-like songs that has been discovered was made by an anonymous "steerage passenger" in a log of a voyage of an
East India Company ship, entitled
The Quid (1832). Crew and passengers alike were noted to join in at heaving the
capstan around. They were said to sing "old ditties", along with which a few verses to one or more songs is given. While this practice was analogous to the practice of what is later called singing "capstan shanties", the form of these verses is not particularly similar to later shanties. These songs do not appear to correspond to any shanty known from later eras. It is possible that the long, monotonous task of heaving the capstan had long inspired the singing of time-passing songs of various sorts, such as those in
The Quid. For example, the composition of capstan-style "sailor songs" by Norwegian poet
Henrik Wergeland as early as 1838 implies that Scandinavians also used such songs. However, these older songs can be distinguished from the later type of songs that were given the label
shanty, suggesting there were other formative influences that gave birth to an appreciably new and distinctly recognized phenomenon.
Influence of African-American and Caribbean work songs Use of the term "shanty", once this paradigm for singing had become a comprehensive practice for most tasks, incorporated all manner of shipboard work songs under its definition, regardless of style and origin. Yet, shanties were of several types, and not all had necessarily developed at the same time. "
Capstan shanties", some of which may have developed out of the earlier capstan songs discussed above, are quite variable in their form and origins. On the other hand, the repertoire of the so-called "halyard shanties" coheres into a consistent form. In the first few decades of the 19th century, European-American culture, especially the Anglophone—the sailors' "Cheer'ly Man" and some capstan songs notwithstanding—was not known for its work songs. By contrast, African workers, both in Africa and in the New World, were widely noted to sing while working. According to Gibb Schreffler, an associate professor of music at Pomona College, European observers found African work-singers remarkable (as Schreffler infers from tone of their descriptions). Schreffler further infers that work songs may have had far less currency among European culture, based on the scant evidence of work-singing aboard European ships in the century prior. Such references begin to appear in the late 18th century, whence one can see the cliché develop that Black Africans "could not" work without singing. For example, an observer in
Martinique in 1806 wrote, "The negroes have a different air and words for every kind of labour; sometimes they sing, and their motions, even while cultivating the ground, keep time to the music." So while the depth of the African-American work song traditions is now recognized, in the early 19th century they stood in stark contrast to the paucity of such traditions among European-Americans. Thus while European sailors had learned to put short chants to use for certain kinds of labor, the paradigm of a comprehensive system of developed work songs for most tasks may have been contributed by the direct involvement of or through the imitation of African-Americans. An example of a work song that was shared between several contexts, including, eventually, sailors working, is "
Grog Time o' Day". This song, the tune of which is now lost, was sung by: Jamaican stevedores at a capstan in 1811; Afro-Caribbeans rowing a boat in
Antigua ca.1814; Black stevedores loading a steamboat in
New Orleans in 1841; and a European-American crew hauling halyards on a clipper-brig out of New York ca.1840s. Other such multi-job songs were: "Round the Corn(er), Sally", "Fire Down Below", "Johnny Come Down to Hilo", "Hilo, Boys, Hilo", "Tommy's Gone Away", "The Sailor Likes His Bottle-O", "Highland Laddie", "Mudder Dinah", "Bully in the Alley", "Hogeye Man", "Good Morning, Ladies, All", "Pay Me the Money Down", "Alabama, John Cherokee", "Yankee John, Stormalong", and "Heave Away (My Johnnies)". A European-American who did just that in 1845 in New Orleans wrote, The day after our arrival the crew formed themselves into two gangs and obtained employment at screwing cotton by the day ... With the aid of a set of jack-screws and a ditty, we would stow away huge bales of cotton, singing all the while. The song enlivened the gang and seemed to make the work much easier. Shanty-writer
Stan Hugill called Mobile Bay—one of the main cotton outports—a "shanty mart", at which sailors and laborers of different cultural backgrounds traded their songs.
Perceptions of contemporary observers Commenters on the ethnic or national origins of shanties, writing in the 19th century when shanties were still in wide use, generally supposed the genre to originate in the United States and recognized parallels to African-American singing—as opposed to earlier English traditions from Britain. An early article to offer an opinion on the origin of shanties (though not calling them by that name), appearing in
Oberlin College's student paper in 1858, drew a comparison between Africans' singing and sailor work songs. Along the African coast you will hear that dirge-like strain in all their songs, as at work or paddling their canoes to and from shore, they keep time to the music. On the southern plantations you will hear it also, and in the negro melodies every where, plaintive and melodious, sad and earnest. It seems like the dirge of national degradation, the wail of a race, stricken and crushed, familiar with tyranny, submission and unrequited labor ... And here I cannot help noticing the similarity existing between the working chorus of the sailors and the dirge-like negro melody, to which my attention was specially directed by an incident I witnessed or rather heard. The author went on to relate an incident in which he once heard "a well known strain of music", finding to his surprise that it was being sung by Black men rowing canoes. He claimed they were singing, "Heigh Jim along, Jim along Josey, Heigh Jim along, Jim along Jo!" The implication is that this song was similar to a sailor song, probably the well-known shanty, "Haul Away, Joe" or "Haul Away for Rosie", viz.: "Way, haul away; O, haul away, my Rosey; Way, haul away; O, haul away,
Joe." The writer did not make a further connection to the
minstrel song "Jim Along Josey", a relationship to which is obvious, although it is unknown whether this was the inspiration for the shanty or vice versa. In much of the shanty repertoire known today one finds parallels to the minstrel songs that came to popularity from the 1840s. The
poetic meter of the couplets of many minstrel songs is identical to those in shanties, and the
non sequitur-type "floating verses" of those songs were heavily borrowed. In an influential early article about shanties, New York journalist
William L. Alden drew a comparison between shanties and
both authentic African-American songs and the quasi-African-American minstrel songs: The old sailor songs had a peculiar individuality. They were barbaric in their wild melody. The only songs that in any way resemble them in character are "
Dixie", and two or three other so-called negro songs by the same writer. This man, known in the minstrel profession as "
Old Emmett", caught the true spirit of the African melodies—the lawless, half-mournful, half-exulting songs of the
Kroomen. These and the sailor songs could never have been the songs of civilized men ... Undoubtedly many sailor songs have a negro origin. They are the reminiscences of melodies sung by negroes stowing cotton in the holds of ships in Southern ports. The "shanty-men", those hards of the forecastle, have preserved to some extent the meaningless words of negro choruses, and have modified the melodies so as to fit them for salt-water purposes. Certain other songs were unmistakably the work of English sailors of an uncertain but very remote period. Alden was not writing as a research historian, but rather as an observer of the then-current shanty-singing. His, then, was an impression of shanties based on their style and manner of performance, and he was writing at a time when shanties had yet to become framed by writers and media as belonging to any canon of national "folk music". An English author of the period,
William Clark Russell, expressed his belief in several works that shanties were American in origin. I think it may be taken that we owe the sailors' working song as we now possess it to the Americans. How far do these songs date back? I doubt if the most ancient amongst them is much older than the century. It is noteworthy that the old voyagers do not hint at the sailors singing out or encouraging their efforts by choruses when at work. In the navy, of course, this sort of song was never permitted. Work proceeded to the strains of a fiddle, to the piping of the boatswain and his mates, or in earlier times yet, to the trumpet. The working song then is peculiar to the Merchant Service, but one may hunt through the old chronicles without encountering a suggestion of its existence prior to American independence and to the establishment of a Yankee marine. As time wore on and shanties were established as an indispensable tool aboard the ships of many nations carrying heterogeneous crew, inspiration from several national and cultural traditions fed into the repertoire and their style was subsequently shaped by countless individuals. Whatever their fundamental origins, by the late 19th century shanties constituted the heritage of international seamen, with little or no necessary national associations.
19th century of the
Black Ball Line New ships and new requirements Writers have characterized the origin of shanties (or perhaps a
revival in shanties, as
William Main Doerflinger theorized This was a time when there was relative peace on the seas and shipping was flourishing.
Packet ships carried cargo and passengers on fixed schedules across the globe. Packet ships were larger and yet sailed with fewer crew than vessels of earlier eras, in addition to the fact that they were expected on strict schedules. These requirements called for an efficient and disciplined use of human labor. American vessels, especially, gained reputations for cruelty as officers demanded high results from their crew. The shanties of the 19th century could be characterized as a sort of new "technology" adopted by sailors to adapt to this way of shipboard life. Recent research has considered a wider range of 19th century sources than had been possible by 20th-century writers. even as shipping shifted to the even faster
clipper ships, suggests that they may not have come into widespread use until the middle of the century. They received a boost from the heavy emigrant movement of
gold rushes in
California and
Australia. Popular shanties of the 1850s included "A Hundred Years Ago", "One More Day", "Santiana", "Haul on the Bowline", and especially "Stormalong". In 1882, due to the proliferation of steamships, Alden was already lamenting the passing of shanties. The "shanty-man"—the chorister of the old packet ship—has left no successors. In the place of a rousing "pulling song", we now hear the rattle of the steam-winch; and the modern windlass worked by steam, or the modern steam-pump, gives us the clatter of cogwheels and the hiss of steam in place of the wild choruses of other days. Singing and steam are irreconcilable. The hoarse steam-whistle is the nearest approach to music that can exist in the hot, greasy atmosphere of the steam-engine. Other writers echoed Alden's lament through and after the 1880s; the first collections of shanties appeared in that decade, in one sense as a response to what the authors believed was a vanishing art. Shanties continued to be used to some extent so long as
windjammers were, yet these were comparatively few in the early 20th century.
20th century Formative writing Folklorists of the first decade of the 20th century, especially those from Britain, included shanties among their interests in collecting folk songs connected with the idea of national heritage.
Cecil Sharp and his colleagues among the English
Folk-Song Society were among the first to take down the lyrics and tunes of shanties directly from the lips of veteran sailors and to publish them more or less faithfully. Their efforts were matched by a number of less-rigorous articles and published collections issued by former sailors themselves. By the 1920s, the body of literature on shanties had grown quite large, yet it was of variable quality. Most editors presented "ideal" versions of songs—not reflecting any one way the shanty may have been sung, but rather a composite picture, edited for print. Bowdlerization and omission of lyrics were typical. Moreover, few authors were trained folklorists and even fewer maintained a critical historical methodology. Editors customarily published fanciful, often nostalgic introductions to the material that included unsubstantiated statements. As a result, though much of the vanishing shanty repertoire was preserved in skeletal form, aspects of the genre were re-envisioned according to contemporary perceptions. These early 20th century collectors' choices of what to include, what to exclude, and how to frame the repertoire all had an effect on how following generations have viewed the genre. Because sailors who had sung shanties were by this time very old or dead, and the general public had little opportunity to experience performances of shanties, the representations by these authors were all the more influential in mediating information and creating the impression of "standard" versions of songs. seized upon shanties as a nostalgic literary device, and included them along with much older, non-shanty sea songs in his 1906 collection ''A Sailor's Garland''. Although Masefield had sea experience (1891–95), he was not an expert on shanties and the versions he gave of songs cannot be assumed entirely authentic. For example, he admits to never having heard a pumping shanty, and yet he goes on to present one without citing its source. In one of his earlier articles, his shanties are set to melodies taken verbatim from Davis and Tozer's earlier work, and he mentions having utilized that and the other widely available collection (L.A. Smith, 1888) as resources. Masefield desired to connect shanties with much older English traditions and literature, and his characterization of individual items as such would prove attractive to later enthusiasts. So for example, Masefield implied that the shanty "A-roving" (which he titled "
The Maid of Amsterdam") was derived from
Thomas Heywood's
The Tragedy of the Rape of Lucrece (1608). Lyrics and ideas from Masefield's collection became among the most quoted or plagiarized in later shanty collections, and by their sheer ubiquity these contributed to 20th century audiences' perceptions of the genre. The 1914 collection by
Frank Thomas Bullen,
Songs of Sea Labour, differed from the work of writers such as Masefield in having a more practical, rather than romantic, tone. Bullen, an Englishman, was an experienced shantyman, who sailed during the heyday of shanties to ports in the Southern U.S. and the Caribbean. He took a firm stance that only true work songs should be included in his collection, thus resisting the temptation to let shanties slide into the genres of ballads or other off-duty songs. (Pressure of his publisher forced him to include two sea songs, clearly demarcated, at the end of the book.) And rather than shape the shanties to appear as narrative pieces, he noted that, since most shanties would usually be improvised, it would be disingenuous to present more than one or two sample verses. As for his framing of the genre's origins, Bullen stated his belief that, "[T]he great majority of these tunes undoubtably emanated from the negroes of the Antilles and the Southern states, a most tuneful race if ever there was one, men moreover who seemed unable to pick up a ropeyarn without a song ..." And Bullen's musicologist editor, Arnold, claimed, "[T]he majority of the Chanties are Negroid in origin ..." Bullen's insistence on including only true work songs in the collection meant that he likely omitted songs—generally those for heaving tasks, like capstan work—which had been easily borrowed from the land-based traditions of various nations. The effect of including only the most exclusively work-oriented songs meant that a higher percentage of African-American songs were represented. 's
English Folk-Chanteys (1914) was one of the first large collections of shanties made by a non-sailor and according to the methods of folklore. Its title reflects the interests and biases of its author. Somewhere between these perspectives was
Cecil Sharp's, whose
English Folk-Chanteys (1914) was published in the same year, and was based on shanties he collected from aged English sailors in Britain. Sharp responds to Bullen's claims of African-American origins by ceding that many shanties were influenced through the singing of Black shantymen—a position that assumes English folk song was the core of the tradition by default. The title of Sharp's work reflects his project of collecting and grouping shanties as part of what he conceived to be a rather continuous English folk song tradition. Sharp states in the introduction that he deliberately excluded shanties which were obviously (i.e. to him) born of popular songs. This idea is problematic when one considers that the popular songs that were feeding shanties were largely American and based in real or imagined African-American musical traits. However, Sharp believed that by eliminating such shanties based on popular songs, he could concentrate those that were "folk" songs. Of his own admission, Sharp lacked any shantying or sea experience to intuitively judge shanties like someone such as Bullen, however he offers his objectivity, recording precisely what was sung to him, as consolation. And whereas Bullen's work was fairly inaccessible, Sharp was influential as the leader of a cohort of scholars who were actively creating the young field of folk song research. By the 1920s, the proliferation of shanty collections had begun to facilitate a revival in shanty singing as entertainment for laypersons (see below), which in turn created a market for more shanty collections that were geared towards a general audience. Writers of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, through their derivative, popular works, established in effect a new body of "common knowledge" about shanties that overwrote some of the knowledge of 19th century observers. In the 1920s, while the proliferation of soft-scholarly books was reifying the shanty repertoire, a few American scholars were audio-recording some of the last surviving sailors that had sung shanties as part of their daily work: in short,
field recording.
James Madison Carpenter, made hundreds of recordings of shanties from singers in Britain,
Ireland, and the north-eastern U.S. in the late 1920s, allowing him to make observation from an extensive set of field data.
Robert Winslow Gordon, founding head of the
Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, recorded sailors singing shanties in the
San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1920s, and later made recordings of African-American work songs in Georgia and elsewhere, seeking to demonstrate correspondences between these and the shanty genre. Neither of these scholars had the opportunity, however, to publish major works on shanties. Similarly,
Alan Lomax's work starting in the 1930s, especially his field recordings of work songs in the
Caribbean and Southern U.S., makes a significant contribution to the information on extant shanty-related traditions. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Canadian folklorist
Helen Creighton collected shanties from
Nova Scotia seamen, such as 'Blow the Man Down', 'Whiskey Johnny', 'The Sailor's Alphabet', 'Shenandoah' and
Rio Grande. Lastly,
William Main Doerflinger carefully recorded and collected shanties from singers in New York and
Nova Scotia in the 1930s and 1940s, the result of which was his
Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman. English folklorist
Peter Kennedy recorded Stanley Slade of
Bristol, England, thought to be 'The Last Shantyman', singing several shanties including 'Haul Away, Joe', 'Leave Her, Johnny' and '
Shenandoah', and the recordings are available online via the
British Library Sound Archive.
Stan Hugill and Shanties from the Seven Seas , author of
Shanties from the Seven Seas. Hugill's old-time sailor image helped bolster the perceived authoritative nature of his work, in contrast to the academic, appearance of many previous scholars. One of the most celebrated volumes on shanties produced in the 20th century is Stan Hugill's
Shanties from the Seven Seas (1961). It is the largest of its kind, owing to Hugill's methodology and chronological position. With respect to methodology, Hugill aimed to be as inclusive as possible—to account for and to present, if sometimes only in fragments, any and all items of shanty repertoire that he was currently able to find. Any song that he had heard or read being attested as having been ever "used as shanty" was included—regardless of whether that song was not generally known as a shanty or if its use as a shanty was rare and incidental. The result is a varied portrait of the genre, highlighting its maximum diversity without, however, giving a focused sense of what songs were most common during the heyday of shanties or in latter eras. Hugill readily included more recently popular songs—those that evidently were not sung until after the shanty genre was experiencing decline, but which were extant when Hugill sailed (1920s–40s). He also culled from the major collections of non-English-language sailor work songs. Hugill's practice of liberally culling from all major prior works,
in combination with original material from his own field experiences, makes it a handy sourcebook for performers, but a difficult work to assess in terms of historical accuracy. A few original collections followed, notably
Roger Abrahams' and Horace Beck's works on contemporary shantying in the Caribbean, yet most publications in the "song collection" genre are general anthologies based in Hugill and his predecessors' works. To a great extent,
Shanties from the Seven Seas is considered the "last word" on shanties and the first stop as a reference. In general, shanty performance by laypersons, up through the first two decades of the 20th century, would have been hindered by the lack of suitable resources, if not lack of interest. Independent of this literature, a revival of sorts was staged by the
U.S. Shipping Board in 1918 when
Stanton H. King of Boston, a merchant sailor of the 1880s, was appointed as "Official Chantey Man for the American Merchant Marine." King taught shanties to the young
Merchant Marine recruits, but it appears that they were used more for entertainment than work functions. A description of the daily training schedule included the following note: Recreation includes singing, for each ship is supplied with a piano. The musical program includes old-time chanties, in which the young men are instructed by a veteran deep-water chantie man. An on-shore revival in shanty singing for leisure was facilitated by song collections of the 1920s, especially Terry's
The Shanty Book (in two volumes, 1921 and 1926). By 1928, commercial recordings of shanties, performed in the manner of classical concert singing, had been released on
His Master's Voice, Vocalion, Parlophone, Edison, Aco, and Columbia labels; many were realizations of scores from Terry's collection. Shanties like "Johnny Come Down to Hilo" were more or less standardized through popular dissemination. The next revival in shanties occurred as part of the Anglophone
folk music revival of the mid-20th century. The American folk revival group
The Almanac Singers were recruited by Alan Lomax to record several shanties for the 1941 album
Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads. In Britain, the incorporation of shanties into the folk revival repertoire was largely led by
A.L. Lloyd starting in the 1950s. An amateur folklorist, Lloyd discarded the earlier classical style of presentations in favor of a more "authentic" performance style. He was generally mysterious about the sources of his shanty arrangements; he obviously referred to collections by editors like Sharp, Colcord, and Doerflinger, however it is often unclear when and whether his versions were based in field experience or his private invention. Lloyd's album
The Singing Sailor (1955) with Ewan MacColl was an early milestone, which made an impression on Stan Hugill when he was preparing his 1961 collection, particularly as the performance style it embodied was considered more appropriate than that of earlier commercial recordings. Many other performers followed, creating influential versions and interpretations of shanties that persist today. For example, Lloyd's personal interpretation of "
South Australia" was taken up by the Irish folk revival group
The Clancy Brothers, from which this version spread to countless folk performers to become established as the "standard" form of what is usually presented as a "traditional" shanty. The Canadian, Alan Mills (1913–1977), recorded numerous songs for Folkways Records including "Songs of the Sea" (1959). Through the mass distribution of particular shanty forms through recordings and clubs, the folk revival has had the effect of creating an impression of rather consistent forms of texts and tunes—a sharp contrast to the highly variable and often improvised nature of work-based shanty singing. Another effect, due to the fact that most folk performers sang shanties along with other genres, is that shanty repertoire was ever more incorporated within the generic fold of "folk song", and their distinctive use, manner of performance, and identity were co-opted. With one foot firmly planted in the world of traditional shanties, the veteran sailor and author Stan Hugill also became a leader (and follower) of trends in the folk music revival. By the late 1970s, the activities of enthusiasts and scholar-performers at places like the
Mystic Seaport Museum (who initiated an annual Sea Music Festival in 1979) and the
San Francisco Maritime Museum established sea music—inclusive of shanties, sea songs, and other maritime music—as a genre with its own circuit of festivals, record labels, performance protocol, and so on. ==Nature of the songs==