Sea Shanties Were Work Tools: Mobile Bay Cotton Screwers and the Dead Horse

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Do you remember a few years ago when, like, you couldn't open a single social media app without seeing someone belting out a sea shanty?

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Oh, yeah, it was literally everywhere.

SPEAKER_1 (0:10)

Right, you'd scroll through your feed, and suddenly there were all these people, maybe even you, honestly.

SPEAKER_2 (0:15)

I definitely participated.

SPEAKER_1 (0:17)

People were layering their voices, you know, imagining themselves as 18th century pirates, swaying with a tinkered of ale, and just singing viral tracks like The Wellerman in this perfect four-part harmony.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

It was this massive, inescapable cultural moment.

SPEAKER_1 (0:33)

Completely.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

You had people collaborating across the globe, separated by thousands of miles, but using these rousing rhythmic tunes to feel unified, especially during a very isolating time.

SPEAKER_1 (0:45)

Yeah, it felt like this beautiful revival of ancient swashbuckling maritime history. But historically speaking, there is a massive catch to that entire phenomenon.

SPEAKER_2 (0:57)

A huge catch.

SPEAKER_1 (0:58)

Right, because as we dig into the historical records, the maritime logs and the musicological research today, we find out that most of the songs we think of as shanties, including the Wellerman, aren't actually shanties at all.

SPEAKER_2 (1:11)

Not even close, really.

SPEAKER_1 (1:12)

And that entire association you might have in your head, the one connecting these songs to black beard, eye patches and 18th century pirates, it is a complete Hollywood myth.

SPEAKER_2 (1:23)

It really is an astonishing case of pop culture just entirely overwriting historical reality. I mean, if you were an 18th century pirate, you were absolutely not singing a sea shanty.

SPEAKER_1 (1:34)

And that is exactly what we are tearing apart today. We are going to show you how these songs weren't recreational drinking anthems at all, but rather like highly sophisticated pieces of 19th century workplace technology.

SPEAKER_2 (1:46)

Right. They were acoustic software born from incredibly surprising cross-cultural exchanges.

SPEAKER_1 (1:53)

Okay, let's unpack this because before we get into the historical timeline, we need to correct the record on what a shanty actually was, mechanically speaking.

SPEAKER_2 (2:00)

Yeah, the mechanics are everything here. The strict academic definition of a shanty is incredibly specific.

It was exclusively a work song, period.

SPEAKER_1 (2:10)

Just for work.

SPEAKER_2 (2:10)

Exactly. It was a utilitarian tool used to accompany and synchronize rhythmical labor on large merchant sailing vessels.

SPEAKER_1 (2:18)

So if you weren't working, you weren't singing it.

SPEAKER_2 (2:20)

If you were not actively engaged in backbreaking physical labor, you were not singing a shanty. It was actually considered terrible luck and frankly, a waste of breath.

SPEAKER_1 (2:29)

Which completely shatters the image of sailors sitting around a barrel of Rome singing these songs.

SPEAKER_2 (2:34)

Yeah. You were talking about what historians classify as sea songs or forbitters.

SPEAKER_1 (2:39)

Okay. Forbitters.

SPEAKER_2 (2:41)

Right. A forbitter was sung for leisure. When you were off duty, resting in the folksill of the ship, you might bring out a fiddle or a concertina and sing ballads to pass the time.

SPEAKER_1 (2:51)

And that is exactly what the Wellerman is.

SPEAKER_2 (2:54)

Exactly. It's a recreational 19th century wailing song. Shanties were purely functional, sung entirely without instruments.

SPEAKER_1 (3:02)

Well, because your hands were busy pulling heavily tensioned ropes or pushing giant wooden beams, you couldn't exactly hold a fiddle.

SPEAKER_2 (3:08)

No, definitely not.

SPEAKER_1 (3:10)

So the mechanics of the song were entirely dictated by the physics of the labor. Yes.

SPEAKER_2 (3:15)

They operated on a very rigid Cullen response format, led by a shantyman. But you shouldn't think of the shantyman as a lead vocalist or some kind of entertainer.

SPEAKER_1 (3:24)

Right.

SPEAKER_2 (3:25)

This person was effectively a foreman.

SPEAKER_1 (3:28)

I want to make sure you, the listener, really grasp this concept, because it's completely different from how we consume music today.

SPEAKER_2 (3:34)

Oh, totally different.

SPEAKER_1 (3:35)

The shantyman's job was not to sound pretty. It was less like a team building exercise and more like, say, the timing belt in a car engine.

SPEAKER_2 (3:43)

That is a perfect way to visualize it.

SPEAKER_1 (3:45)

Right. The song is the belt. If the cylinders, meaning the sailors, fire out of order, the engine stalls and the massive sail doesn't move. The song forces everyone to fire on the exact same millisecond.

SPEAKER_2 (3:58)

Yeah, because a wooden ship requires massive amounts of kinetic energy to operate.

SPEAKER_1 (4:02)

Huge amounts.

SPEAKER_2 (4:04)

You can't have ten men pulling a heavy rope out of phase with one another. If five guys pull, and then a second later the other five pull, you've wasted all your energy.

SPEAKER_1 (4:13)

And you might actually lose the rope.