Sex and drink and rock and roll: The sea shanty in its economic, social and cultural context
Channel: War Studies KCL
Date: 2022-05-27

There were three recurrent themes in the lyrics of sea shanties: references to the women sailors had encountered or hoped to meet; the pleasures or otherwise of alcohol; and the work, discipline, and dangers of shipboard life. For instance, the shanty chorus ‘rock and roll me overboard’ long predates the name given to the popular music genre.

This event explored both the economic need in ships of the mid-19th century to employ a shanty singer and secondly the social role of shanties in knitting together a disparate group of seamen. The talk also covered the survival of shanties, long after their redundancy as work songs, and how a strong culture has grown up of amateurs singing them.