In the final week of 2020, Nathan Evans, a 26-year-old Scottish postman and aspiring musician, shared a video of himself on TikTok, singing a maritime slum called “Soon May the Wellerman Come”. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but the app has a way of turning esoteric powder into viral gold.
In fact, in the past two weeks, his old video has been shared and performed duets thousands of times: by professional vocalists and instrumentalists, marine enthusiasts, electronic beatmakers, memers, a Caco puppet, the Frog and much more.
“If it weren’t for TikTok, I would be so bored and claustrophobic,” said Evans via Zoom. “But it can feel like having a group. You can collaborate with other people and make friends easily. “
What is a Sea Shanty?
One of the original purposes of the favela do mar was to create a sense of community and shared purpose. On merchant navy ships in the 1700s and 1800s, a favela guided sailors in songs while working, distracting them from their work, livening up their tasks and setting a pace.
“The different types of work and tasks on board would have different huts tied to them,” said Gerry Smyth, professor of Irish cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University and author of “Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas. “
According to Mr. Smyth’s research, shacks have evolved to combine and accelerate specific tasks. “If you were pulling a candle, for example, the shack was designed around the physical effort required to achieve this,” he said. “Everyone would pull at the same time,” he added, induced by the rhythm of the music.
The first maritime shacks could be as old as the sea. They explore the impulse to share stories from oral literature, which is even older.
Singing is fun and has lifted sailors’ spirits, Smyth said. The songs also offered a common language for multinational teams.
“This community aesthetic really goes back to a very old time,” said Smyth. “When we are sitting around the fire, we are talking about hunting. We achieve identity through the community, through the underlying beat of the drum. ”In these old storytelling traditions, everyone knew the story and participated in its narrative.
Other work songs were performed in the same impulse to share shared stories. This is especially apparent in the tradition of calling and responding to African American folk and spiritual songs, which were based on the democratic participation practices of sub-Saharan public life.
For the slums of the sea, the passage of time has led to some revisions. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, scholarly collectors of sea shacks cleaned up the letters, many of which were quite “obscene”, Smyth said. These collectors trivialized the songs, replacing “whores” with “beautiful maidens”, removing the coarse language and smoothing out drinking nights in the pub.
In versions that remained more faithful to the life and language of the sailors, these ballads focused on what Smyth calls “the fundamental coordinates of the favela’s imaginary”: getting to the port and returning to the sea. In the vast blue, they found a romanticized life of toil and violence. Back on dry land, his stories starred pimps, prostitutes and drunken sailors who lost their wages at the bar and in alley dice games.
About this Shanty
The recently popularized “Soon May the Wellerman Come” – which The Longest Johns covered in 2018 – leaves out such perverse narratives in favor of a whaling adventure like “Moby Dick”. The subject was real: the Weller brothers’ whaling company had an outpost in Otago, New Zealand. The lyric of the song features sailors harpooning a whale and hoisting it up to the ship for the butcher shop.
“This well could have been a slum cut” or a song that men sang while killing a whale, said Michael P. Dyer, marine curator at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
This particular task was complicated; harvesting whale parts – oil for lighting lamps and use in cosmetics, fins for corsets of whale bones, tongue for food – was hard work. The “tongue” that is mentioned in the lyrics refers to the removal of the tongue, the most edible part of the whale, according to Dyer.
As for the line “to bring us sugar, tea and rum”, some believe it may refer to the participation of whaling in the Atlantic slave trade triangle. (Consequently, several commentators have suggested that the meme has lost its charm.) Others believe the phrase refers to another ship coming to replenish whalers on their long hunt.
“‘Wellerman’ is not really a slum,” said David Coffin, a folk musician and music educator in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a whaling song with the beat of a favela, he said, but its purpose is for a ballad – to tell a story, not to help sailors set the time.
In any case, the form, said Smyth, is malleable, which could explain the thousands of riffs, duets and adaptations that proliferated online. Some people even started to cover popular songs – as “All Star” by Smash Mouth – in a slum cadence.
“It is not the beauty of music that attracts people,” said Coffin. “It’s the energy.”
“This is one of the things I love about the slums of the sea,” he added. “Accessibility. You don’t have to be a trained singer to sing in it. You shouldn’t sing beautiful. “