Sea Shanty - History and Development - Emergence - Influence of African-American and Caribbean Work Songs

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” (see below), 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. The distinctive “double-pull” format that typifies most of these songs—also at times used, with slight changes, for pumps, windlass, and capstan, too—was a later development that appears to owe much to African-American work songs.

In the first few decades of the 19th century, White 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. The fact that Euro-American observers found African work-singers so remarkable (as can be gleaned from the tone of their descriptions) suggests that work songs were indeed rather foreign to their culture. 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 Euro-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. The work contexts in which African-Americans sang songs comparable to shanties included:

• Boat-rowing on rivers of the south-eastern U.S. and Caribbean;
• Corn-shucking parties on plantations of the south-eastern U.S.;
• The work of stokers or “firemen,” who cast wood into the furnaces of steamboats plying great American rivers;
• Stevedoring on the U.S. eastern seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean — including "cotton-screwing" (using a large jackscrew to compress and force cotton bales into the holds of outbound ships at ports of the American South).

During the first half of the 19th century, some of the songs African-Americans sang also began to appear in use for shipboard tasks, i.e. as shanties.

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 Euro-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)."

While the non-sailor occupations noted above were mainly within the purview of Black laborers, the last of them, cotton-screwing, was one in which non-Blacks also began to engage by the 1840s. These workers often came from the ranks of sailors of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, including sailors from Britain and Ireland who, wanting to avoid the cold winter seasons on the Atlantic, went ashore to engage in the well-paid labor of cotton-screwing. A Euro-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.