Thread by @NomeDaBarbarian

This is probably as good a cultural moment as any to remind the world that Sea Shanties are Black Music.

https://twitter.com/Beertheist/status/1348759849077714951

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.

https://twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1063281584256634880?s=20

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?

I give you: Space Shanties)

https://twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1304616068938252289?s=20

(PPS: Gonna group some replies right here.

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.)