listen just because a song was written before 1920 and has a fiddle in it doesn’t make it a sea shanty
I saw a ‘sea shanty playlist’ with finnegans wake in it and I almost died
a sea shatny is an unaccompanied work song with a call and response structure just because a folk song is about the sea doesn’t make it a shanty
actual tall ship sailor here! this isn’t quite accurate. there are two main categories of sea shanty: working shanties and fo’c’sle shanties.
working shanties are (obviously) songs sung while working. they typically have a steady beat and a call and response format – useful not only for keeping a massive crew all hauling on a line / heaving on a capstan together, but also for not becoming mind-numbingly bored as you do this for hours on end (raising an anchor could literally take an hour in the days before hydraulic windlasses and propeller-driven ships. last time i did it, even with using the ship’s engine to get us over the anchor, it took about fifteen minutes of constant work to get the anchor up). there are subcategories of working shanty based on what kind of work you’re doing (short haul, long haul, capstan e.g)
fo’c’sle shanties (short for forecastle, where the common jack tar would sleep/hang out) are another story. they were sung purely for entertainment, sort of like campfire songs. as such, they are much freer in form – they often aren’t call and response, and they rarely keep as steady a beat.
either of these two categories can be accompanied! the shantyman would often play the fiddle while standing on the capstan as it rotated, and of course in fo’c’sle shanties anything goes. besides, if you wouldn’t slam a traditional irish tune for having guitar playing chords behind the melody (an innovation that only came about in the 1970s, and piano accompaniment in the 1920s, prior to which everyone just played the melody in unison), there’s no need to slam a shanty for having accompaniment, even non-traditional accompaniment. it makes stuff sound nicer!
Nava 