This sense of togetherness provided by music has been useful all through human history. “We just seem to be primed to respond and connect better when there is melody and timbre and rhythm and all these elements of music added to something.” In the same way as chanting at a football match or singing in a religious setting or even singing lullabies to children, music enables us to reach a different emotional state. It makes us feel bonded and connected,” she says. It taps into our own natural communication system. “Music has a real capacity to connect us. The musical element helped people to bond and work better as a team, Loveday says. A simple chant of ‘heave-ho’ or ‘one, two, three’ could keep people in time. Part of what makes work songs useful is simply keeping everyone in time with each other: everyone pulls on the rope to the beat of the music, and the work becomes physically much easier.īut it’s not just that. “The melody and the rhythm are designed to match the activities that are going on.” Why do work songs help with hard labour? “They're very, very repetitive and fairly upbeat, uplifting tunes and melodies that people can very quickly join and sing together,” says Loveday.
Sea shanties are work songs that were created by sailors aboard merchant ships, usually sung in accompaniment of hard labour such as hoisting the sails or raising the anchor. So we spoke to Prof Catherine Loveday, a neuropsychologist who specialises in music at the University of Westminster. Read the original article.Naturally, we here at BBC Science Focus wanted to know what it was about sea shanties that makes them so catchy. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Understanding the context behind these songs enables us to move beyond the visceral pleasures of communal performance and towards a more nuanced view of the world, encouraging us to consider what has changed since the days of the Wellerman.Īdrian York, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music Performance, University of Westminster In a world riven by competing ideologies, drowning in fake news and with many people’s lives on hold because of COVID, it isn’t surprising that joining an online community to harmonise a melody and lyric that reaches back to a simpler if more brutal past, has many attractions. It can be seen as a genuine cultural expression by exploited workers for whom “sugar and tea and rum” provided a much-needed respite from the drudgery and toil of their daily lives. But it is apparent from an analysis of the lyrics that the song is neither a post-colonial type of critique nor an embrace of the exploitation of indigenous peoples or the slave trade. There has been some debate on social media about the “problematic” nature of these references. The chorus lyric begins: “Soon may the Wellerman come, To bring us sugar and tea and rum.” These were products that were brought back from what was known as “ The triangular trade”, with enslaved Africans having been sold to work on plantations in North America and the Caribbean and the commodities being brought back on the return leg. But there is darkness embedded in the song. There is an innocence and integrity about Nathan Evans’ performance and most of the responses to it. However, the song also has six verses that tell the tale of a 40-day whaling expedition by a ship named the Billy of Tea and its crew’s struggles to land a particularly fractious whale. Wellerman shares many characteristics of the shanty: its call-and-response form, strong pulse and a melodic structure that rises and falls, rather like a wave. Whaling songs, on the other hand, seem to have emerged out of the shanty tradition with the addition of a folk-ballad narrative structure. London Review of Books January 15, 2021 Indeed, the ‘very practice of shantying may have its roots in the interaction of sailors and black dockworkers.’ on the Haitian revolution: It isn’t a coincidence that British sea shanties ‘bear striking resemblances to Caribbean slave songs’.
These sea shanties have a strong rhythmic flow and a call-and-response structure, with the call being sung by the “shantyman”, a lead sailor who would cue up each task with a specific song. This practice was also adopted by merchant sailors when performing specific tasks on sailing vessels, such as pulling ropes and hoisting anchors.
Enslaved people working on southern plantations would replicate African traditions of singing songs to accompany their work. Shanties show the clear influence of the African-American tradition of work-songs.
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