Drunken Sailor - Song Text

Song Text

Refrain:

Weigh heigh and up she rises (/Hoo-ray and up she rises)

Weigh heigh and up she rises (/Patent blocks of different sizes)

Weigh heigh and up she rises

Early in the morning

Traditional verses:

What shall we do with a drunken sailor,

What shall we do with a drunken sailor,

What shall we do with a drunken sailor,

Early in the morning?

Put/chuck him in the long boat till he's sober.

Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her.

What shall we do with a drunken soldier?

Put/lock him in the guard room 'til he gets sober.

Put him in the scuppers with a hose-pipe on him.(x3)

Pull out the plug and wet him all over

Tie him to the taffrail when she's yardarm under

Heave him by the leg in a runnin' bowline.

Scrape the hair off his chest with a hoop-iron razor.

Give 'im a dose of salt and water.

Stick on his back a mustard plaster.

Keep him there and make 'im bale 'er.

Give 'im a taste of the bosun's rope-end.

What'll we do with a Limejuice skipper?

Soak him in oil till he sprouts a flipper.

What shall we do with the Queen o' Sheba?

What shall we do with the Virgin Mary?

Additional verses:

Shave his chin with a rusty razor.

Shave his belly with a rusty razor.

Give 'im a hair of the dog that bit him.

Put him in the bilge and make him drink it.

Put him in bed with the captain's daughter.

Pronunciation of "early"

The word "early" is often pronounced as "earl-aye" in contemporary performances. Publications of 19th and early 20th century, however, did not note this was the case. Neither the field recordings of Richard Maitland by Alan Lomax (1939) nor those of several veteran sailors in Britain by James Madison Carpenter in the 1920s use this pronunciation. Yet on his popular recording of 1956, Burl Ives pronounced "earl-eye." Subsequently, Stan Hugill, whose influential Shanties from the Seven Seas was published in 1961, stated in that work that the word was "always" pronounced "earl-aye," but his statement is belied by the considerable body of earlier evidence.