Shanties and other songs of the sea

~~Lord Larehip~~ · 11-29-2014, 11:49 AM

I've always had a thing for the ocean--don't know why. I even joined the US Navy just to live as a sailor which I did for 6 years. It's a rough life--being a sailor. I can only imagine what it must have been like in the 18th and 19th centuries. Do you know what it's like to be so seasick, you wish you'd just die and get it over with? So sick that you are hallucinating? So sick, your head feels like it's been overfilled with a mixture of broken glass and jagged, heavy rocks? So sick, you're ready to jump into the ocean just to get off that godawful pitching ship that rocks side to side for weeks at a time without a single goddamn let up--won't give you 5 seconds of a steady deck so you can orient yourself?

And when you're sick like that, you think anyone cares? You think you're going to go lay down in your rack and moan yourself to sleep? F-uck no! Get your ass up and get to work! I remember being so sick my first time out that I couldn't keep my head up while I was supposed to be watching a capstan breaker during tests. A master chief walked by an saw me--clearly sick and nearly delirious as I was--and chewed me a new as-shole. He didn't give a f-uck how sick I was, my job was to watch that f-ucking breaker and, by god, I was going to WATCH THAT F-UCKING BREAKER!!!!!!!

The reason is that if you mollycoddle a guy whose sick, he thinks he should be sick. So you lay into him and force him to get over it and get to work. After getting my arse chewed, I forced myself to keep my head up thinking, "Come on, boy! Don't let this kick your ass! Other guys work with it, now get with it! Remember what the doc [head corpsman] said, it's all in your damn head!" If I found my head starting to sag, I forced it back up again. And eventually--eventually--I started to come around and my sickness began to subside.

After four voyages, I rarely got sick and could even stand watches and work on equipment in very rough seas with the ship tossing about without feeling a thing. And when I found some new guy in a stupor with seasickness, I'd chew his ass and make him get to work. Eventually, he'd get the hang of it. Sailors call that "getting your sea legs." You learn how the ocean moves and you just sort move with it. Trouble is, you'd get land-sick once you were back onshore. With your body adjusted to ocean movement, it still continued to move with the ocean while you were onshore making it feel like you're walking on a trampoline. Landsickness wasn't that bad, though, not like seasickness.

To be a sailor is to learn how to live with minimal sleep. You just don't get much chance to sleep. You're always working on equipment late into the night or someone's waking you at 0330 hours to get ready to assume the 0400-0800 watch (which you actually assume at 0345 hours) or an emergency goes down and you have to man your GQ station. Always something stealing your sleep. Once I got off the midwatch in the #1 engine room and hit my rack for about an hour--I was dead out when I was awoken. The vent fans in the #2 engine room weren't working and it was my job to figure out why. So I dragged myself out of my rack, got dressed, went down to the #2 engine room and the top watch showed me what was wrong with the vent fans. The only problem was, they functioned perfectly--nothing wrong with them. He said, "Jesus, man, I'm sorry! I swear it wasn't working a second ago! I swear it wasn't working."

"That's alright," I said. "I was having a nightmare anyway." And went back to my rack. That's life as a sailor.

Another time, we were a couple of days from docking in a foreign port--Europe somewhere--and the in-port light wasn't working. I went over and checked the fuses but they were good. The only other thing to do at this point was to check the bulb itself and see if it was burned out. Trouble was, the bulb was almost at the top of the mast and we were in pretty choppy seas. But, the light has to be functional as we approach port so someone had to go up the mast to change it. They tried to get this one guy to go but he went up about 10 feet and he froze--wouldn't climb any higher. "I'll go up," I said. Me and another guy went up--you have to have two guys at all times in case there's an accident aloft. As I'm changing the bulb out, I can see the ship waaaaayyyy down there--guys ondeck watching me looked like ants. I just tried not to look and concentrate on what I had to do. I didn't want to drop the bulb--that would suck. As the ship tossed in the waves, I could see the weatherdeck below swing to the right across my field of vision and then there was nothing but ocean. Then the ship would swing across my vision to the left and then nothing but ocean and this kept repeating. But I get the bulb changed and the in-port light illuminates and so we came back down.

These are Christmas lights on a guided missile destroyer. The electricians had to string these up and it wasn't optional, a ship in its homeport during Christmas had to have these lights up. Since I was an electrician, I can vouch for how bad it sucked to have to do this especially in that bitter cold wind coming in off the ocean. When we toured northern Europe on a goodwill tour, we had to put these up in every port, stay for 3 or 4 days, and then taken them down again and put back out to sea. If you think THAT doesn't suck, you've probably never done a real lick of work in your life.

But there were good times too. I sailed with some good buds--and with complete as-sholes too--but you only hit the foreign towns with guys you liked. You'd either go to the bars and then the whorehouse or to the whorehouse first and then the bars. A lot of places had the whorehouse and bar in the same place which made it easier. Went all over Europe, all over South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South Asia. The best port we ever docked in was in this fjord in Trondheim, Norway. Across the bay was this mountain with a white thread winding its way down that ended in a waterfall and at night we had the "nordlies" over us--the aurora borealis--which is breathtakingly beautiful. Pakistan was really strange. Old school Muslim nation with camels and long-eared cows everywhere. At dusk, you'd see bats pour out of buildings and fill the sky. But Kuwait and Bahrain were more modern. Kuwait was almost like America with its nightlife. Brazil, Venezuela and Columbia were a lot of fun. Got to tour the Reeperbahn in Hamburg which is completely wild. The Azores were the most beautiful spot I saw. Jamaica was...ummmm...crazy. Went through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea which looks like it did 2000 years ago. Some good times.

And life aboard ship? Crowded. There is minimal space for the crew. Any large spaces are strictly for equipment. A person gets only enough to be functional. John F. Kennedy put it best:

Now in the modern Navy, we don't sing worksongs or shanties. Shanties were meant for strenuous work that took teams of hands working in unison to complete such as turning the capstan or hauling yards. Today the capstan is turned electrically and, of course, we don't haul yards anymore. They were structured as call & response. "Shanty" is just a corruption or variant of "chantey" or something to chant.

Haul, Boys, Haul - The Bilge Pumps - YouTube
"Haul Boys Haul" is an old shanty. On the ships, they were sung without musical accompaniment. But as pub singalongs, church hymns and what not they were adapted for instruments and even as instrumentals:

Adventureland - Haul Boys Haul - YouTube

Most shanties still popular today come from England and and Ireland were adopted by the New England Yankees. One of the most popular was "Spanish Ladies" Melville mentions as being sung by the crew of the Pequod in "Moby Dick":

sea shanties - spanish ladies - YouTube

Some American shanties were made up by American blacks such as "Mail Day" which has the structure of a spiritual. Another is "Roll the Woodpile Down":

The Dreadnoughts - Roll The Woodpile Down - YouTube

It is often referred to as being Irish but I find that questionable. Lines as "way down in Florida" and "that brown girl o' mine's on the Georgia line" and a reference to getting with those "yaller girls" would indicate this is an American shanty of black American origin. Also when they sing, "That brown girl o' mine's on the Georgia line" they break into barbershop quartet harmonies (and every version I've ever heard does it) and the barbershop quartet came from American blacks.

The Wabash Minstrels of the flagship the USS Wabash taken in 1863. Certainly they would have sounded very interesting.

11-29-2014, 11:49 AM	#1 (permalink)
~~Lord Larehip~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Jun 2013 Posts: 899	Shanties and other songs of the sea I've always had a thing for the ocean--don't know why. I even joined the US Navy just to live as a sailor which I did for 6 years. It's a rough life--being a sailor. I can only imagine what it must have been like in the 18th and 19th centuries. Do you know what it's like to be so seasick, you wish you'd just die and get it over with? So sick that you are hallucinating? So sick, your head feels like it's been overfilled with a mixture of broken glass and jagged, heavy rocks? So sick, you're ready to jump into the ocean just to get off that godawful pitching ship that rocks side to side for weeks at a time without a single goddamn let up--won't give you 5 seconds of a steady deck so you can orient yourself? And when you're sick like that, you think anyone cares? You think you're going to go lay down in your rack and moan yourself to sleep? F-uck no! Get your ass up and get to work! I remember being so sick my first time out that I couldn't keep my head up while I was supposed to be watching a capstan breaker during tests. A master chief walked by an saw me--clearly sick and nearly delirious as I was--and chewed me a new as-shole. He didn't give a f-uck how sick I was, my job was to watch that f-ucking breaker and, by god, I was going to WATCH THAT F-UCKING BREAKER!!!!!!! The reason is that if you mollycoddle a guy whose sick, he thinks he should be sick. So you lay into him and force him to get over it and get to work. After getting my arse chewed, I forced myself to keep my head up thinking, "Come on, boy! Don't let this kick your ass! Other guys work with it, now get with it! Remember what the doc [head corpsman] said, it's all in your damn head!" If I found my head starting to sag, I forced it back up again. And eventually--eventually--I started to come around and my sickness began to subside. After four voyages, I rarely got sick and could even stand watches and work on equipment in very rough seas with the ship tossing about without feeling a thing. And when I found some new guy in a stupor with seasickness, I'd chew his ass and make him get to work. Eventually, he'd get the hang of it. Sailors call that "getting your sea legs." You learn how the ocean moves and you just sort move with it. Trouble is, you'd get land-sick once you were back onshore. With your body adjusted to ocean movement, it still continued to move with the ocean while you were onshore making it feel like you're walking on a trampoline. Landsickness wasn't that bad, though, not like seasickness. To be a sailor is to learn how to live with minimal sleep. You just don't get much chance to sleep. You're always working on equipment late into the night or someone's waking you at 0330 hours to get ready to assume the 0400-0800 watch (which you actually assume at 0345 hours) or an emergency goes down and you have to man your GQ station. Always something stealing your sleep. Once I got off the midwatch in the #1 engine room and hit my rack for about an hour--I was dead out when I was awoken. The vent fans in the #2 engine room weren't working and it was my job to figure out why. So I dragged myself out of my rack, got dressed, went down to the #2 engine room and the top watch showed me what was wrong with the vent fans. The only problem was, they functioned perfectly--nothing wrong with them. He said, "Jesus, man, I'm sorry! I swear it wasn't working a second ago! I swear it wasn't working." "That's alright," I said. "I was having a nightmare anyway." And went back to my rack. That's life as a sailor. Another time, we were a couple of days from docking in a foreign port--Europe somewhere--and the in-port light wasn't working. I went over and checked the fuses but they were good. The only other thing to do at this point was to check the bulb itself and see if it was burned out. Trouble was, the bulb was almost at the top of the mast and we were in pretty choppy seas. But, the light has to be functional as we approach port so someone had to go up the mast to change it. They tried to get this one guy to go but he went up about 10 feet and he froze--wouldn't climb any higher. "I'll go up," I said. Me and another guy went up--you have to have two guys at all times in case there's an accident aloft. As I'm changing the bulb out, I can see the ship waaaaayyyy down there--guys ondeck watching me looked like ants. I just tried not to look and concentrate on what I had to do. I didn't want to drop the bulb--that would suck. As the ship tossed in the waves, I could see the weatherdeck below swing to the right across my field of vision and then there was nothing but ocean. Then the ship would swing across my vision to the left and then nothing but ocean and this kept repeating. But I get the bulb changed and the in-port light illuminates and so we came back down. These are Christmas lights on a guided missile destroyer. The electricians had to string these up and it wasn't optional, a ship in its homeport during Christmas had to have these lights up. Since I was an electrician, I can vouch for how bad it sucked to have to do this especially in that bitter cold wind coming in off the ocean. When we toured northern Europe on a goodwill tour, we had to put these up in every port, stay for 3 or 4 days, and then taken them down again and put back out to sea. If you think THAT doesn't suck, you've probably never done a real lick of work in your life. But there were good times too. I sailed with some good buds--and with complete as-sholes too--but you only hit the foreign towns with guys you liked. You'd either go to the bars and then the whorehouse or to the whorehouse first and then the bars. A lot of places had the whorehouse and bar in the same place which made it easier. Went all over Europe, all over South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South Asia. The best port we ever docked in was in this fjord in Trondheim, Norway. Across the bay was this mountain with a white thread winding its way down that ended in a waterfall and at night we had the "nordlies" over us--the aurora borealis--which is breathtakingly beautiful. Pakistan was really strange. Old school Muslim nation with camels and long-eared cows everywhere. At dusk, you'd see bats pour out of buildings and fill the sky. But Kuwait and Bahrain were more modern. Kuwait was almost like America with its nightlife. Brazil, Venezuela and Columbia were a lot of fun. Got to tour the Reeperbahn in Hamburg which is completely wild. The Azores were the most beautiful spot I saw. Jamaica was...ummmm...crazy. Went through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea which looks like it did 2000 years ago. Some good times. And life aboard ship? Crowded. There is minimal space for the crew. Any large spaces are strictly for equipment. A person gets only enough to be functional. John F. Kennedy put it best: Now in the modern Navy, we don't sing worksongs or shanties. Shanties were meant for strenuous work that took teams of hands working in unison to complete such as turning the capstan or hauling yards. Today the capstan is turned electrically and, of course, we don't haul yards anymore. They were structured as call & response. "Shanty" is just a corruption or variant of "chantey" or something to chant. Haul, Boys, Haul - The Bilge Pumps - YouTube "Haul Boys Haul" is an old shanty. On the ships, they were sung without musical accompaniment. But as pub singalongs, church hymns and what not they were adapted for instruments and even as instrumentals: Adventureland - Haul Boys Haul - YouTube Most shanties still popular today come from England and and Ireland were adopted by the New England Yankees. One of the most popular was "Spanish Ladies" Melville mentions as being sung by the crew of the Pequod in "Moby Dick": sea shanties - spanish ladies - YouTube Some American shanties were made up by American blacks such as "Mail Day" which has the structure of a spiritual. Another is "Roll the Woodpile Down": The Dreadnoughts - Roll The Woodpile Down - YouTube It is often referred to as being Irish but I find that questionable. Lines as "way down in Florida" and "that brown girl o' mine's on the Georgia line" and a reference to getting with those "yaller girls" would indicate this is an American shanty of black American origin. Also when they sing, "That brown girl o' mine's on the Georgia line" they break into barbershop quartet harmonies (and every version I've ever heard does it) and the barbershop quartet came from American blacks. The Wabash Minstrels of the flagship the USS Wabash taken in 1863. Certainly they would have sounded very interesting.