Quite literally. Historically, that's where they come from. While there were some songs that were used to organize work in white culture, it wasn't widespread for sailors - enough so that they saw and commented on (often enslaved) Black workers singing while they worked.
In Martinique, in 1806, a sailor commenting: "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."
Given the interactions between Black slaves and workers with sailors in the various ports of the 18th century, the translation of "Black dockworkers use songs to organize when to lift/pull/haul/stay," to "Sailors think this is a good idea" is a straight line.
Eventually, Mobile Bay, one of the main cotton outports in the US, gets called a "Shanty Mart."
A place where sailors and workers would, in the course of loading, offloading, and leisure, trade songs with each other.
The long and short of it is, like most American musical styles, it has a Black pedigree.
I've got a thread going more in-depth on shanties here, if y'all would like.
Side note - contemporary white authors in the 1800s (when Shanties were still in heavy use) just generally agreed that they were American music with a strong tie to African-American work songs.
Quoting William Alden, in 1882:
"Undoubtedly many sailor songs have a negro origin. They are the reminiscences of melodies sung by negroes stowing cotton in the holds of ships in Southern ports. The "shanty-men," those hards of the forecastle, have preserved to some extent..."
"...the meaningless words of negro choruses, and have modified the melodies so as to fit them for salt-water purposes."
Racism notwithstanding, it's not exactly a thing you can argue.
Gonna mute for my sanity; I'm glad this took off, instead of what usually gets traction (my shitposts).
Lemme say - I grew up with Mountain Music and Bluegrass. Twice a year my dad and I would even cart off to the woods, to Rockbridge or Mt Airy, for Fiddle Festivals.
And I remember, one year, a conversation about whether a group of Caribbean/Gulf fiddlers "belonged," and it blew my mind, because they were absolutely a part of the musical tradition.
And I didn't realize until I was an adult that it was that pesky racism again.
This is my music. I love it. I love that it's getting love, in this moment.
I'd like for folks who might otherwise think of it as a purely white people thing to be able to find connection to it too.
And I'd like for white folks to recognize the debt that's owed to Black music.
I said, in the first post, that Sea Shanties were Black Music. That's true, if not exclusively so. They're also Celt music, just by way of for instance.
It might be better to say, that they're American music.
And American Music is Black Music.
Let's not ignore that.
Cheers.
(PS: If anyone else is, like me, a huge fucking nerd, and wants to know what's over the horizon after Sea Shanties?
Sea Shanty refers to a specific folk tradition of usually merchant naval work songs, which starts in the Atlantic sea trade in the 1800s. It also incorporates, later, the leisure or fo'c'sle songs sung while off duty.)
(I am not claiming that any one group first decided to sing while working - just the opposite, in fact, if you read the second post in the thread.
I am talking about the origins of a specific folk tradition, which, yes, is A) relatively recent, and B) focused on the Coastal US.)
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The only planning I might put in consciously is for animal threads, and that's only because folks have made it clear to me that it's important to do image attributions and descriptions.
Which is part of why I don't really do them often. It's hard to do a thread with planning.
Putting those extra steps - sourcing an image, and describing it - breaks the stream of consciousness and turns the thread into a project I'm working on, instead of just "thoughts, as they happen."
Don't misunderstand me. They ARE important. That's why I'm trying to do them.
"I just want to ask questions, I don't know why you're so opposed to that," the anime avatar said, barely audible over the shitstorm of abuse his easily googleable question came in the middle of.
"I am a good and civil and reasonable person," he reassured himself.
"I don't know why you won't engage with me in good faith."
A mid-tier brigade might have a few hundred people each spending ten minutes being shitty to you in your mentions.
That works out to ~50 man-hours of abuse.
That's a week and overtime of getting shit flung at you.
Literally nobody's psyche is set up to handle that.
Dreaming of a transhumanist future where my brain can be augmented, where I can have extra processing power, and where my executive function could be a program that talks to me.
An accessible transhumanist future. Something that becomes as common as glasses.
I've got no interoception - so if my augment keeps track of my caloric needs, and tells me "hey, two more bites and you're good," and I can just trust it?
Even if she didn't perform sedition herself, the UCMJ makes it explicit that "failing to suppress" sedition carries the death penalty.
10 U.S. Code § 894 - Art. 94.
Anyone who "fails to do his utmost to prevent and suppress a mutiny or sedition being committed in his presence, or fails to take all reasonable means to inform his superior commissioned officer or commanding officer of a mutiny or sedition..."
You know, if you had said "this is performative and has no substance," I would have been forced to agree.
But INSTEAD you had to pretend that you don't understand, to pretend that you think THEY think Amen is a gendered word, to perform outrage for the anti-woke crowd.