Songs sung to accompany work in maritime settings. The practice of singing while at work was historically a widespread phenomenon crossing cultural boundaries from Greece to the Hebrides and extending to virtually every corner of the earth. In all of subSaharan Africa, including the area from Senegal to Angola, from which most of the American slaves were taken, songs were sung by individuals to accompany a variety of tasks, including ironwork and weaving. More typically, group tasks, such as agricultural work and the rowing of boats, utilized the overlapping call-and-response singing style, the leader calling or singing a phrase and then joining the other workers in a completing chorus. The Limba of Sierra Leone sang while hoeing in their rice seed. In work collectives in Dahomey (modern Benin), known as dokpwe, workers used such a style while kneading earth for walls, laying thatch, and hoeing, and there were other cooperative labor systems—such as the kurum of Cameroon, the ku of Liberia, and, in the New World, the coumbite and. societe of Haiti and the fishing people of Nevis andTobago—in which the people utilized singing to accomplish their work, be it catching fish or moving houses. Many of these tasks, in fact, both in Africa and the Caribbean, were water-related, from the growing of rice, to fishing, to transportation. West African dugout canoes, or pirogues, have been shown to have contributed to the evolution of the Native American canoe, and West African men, such as the Kru of Liberia, were acknowledged masters of both boat construction and boat handling. The early presence of the Wolof of Senegal aboard European ships may have contributed to the high instance of Wolof-derived words that have survived in New World English, and men of African descent were to be quite prevalent aboard sailing ships and those that came after. The use of chanteys (or shantys) aboard European and New World ships seems to draw heavily on West African influence as well. While there was at least a Celtic precedent for maritime worksongs, the African call-and-response pattern, such as that still used by the boatmen of the Zaire (Congo) River, seems to have had a strong effect on the evolution of the New World chantey. The word itself, depending on the choice of spelling, may derive either from the imperative form of the French verb chanter (to sing) or from the singing heard from or during the moving of the waterside huts, or “shantys,” another French-derived word from chantier (a timberyard or shipyard). Neither spelling occurs until the middle of the 19th century, and chanteying as we know it may date from as little as a generation before that. The first mentions of songs we can identify with this classic chanteying tradition are drawn from shore-based occupations of New World Blacks, including the songs of the boatmen who worked the waters of the Caribbean and the Southeastern United States. Like their African forebears—or, indeed, as they themselves may have done before being transported—the New World boatmen sang as they rowed, utilizing the call-and-response pattern and, occasionally, the beat of a drum. Much remarked upon in the coastal waters of South Carolina, the sound and style of these workers were very similar to those heard on the coast of Ghana in the 1790s. The songs of the boatmen on the South Carolina coast also seem to have added to this a high proportion of Christian spiritual songs, including “On Canaan’s Happy Shore,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “Run, Mary, Run,” and “Drinking Wine, Drinking Wine.” The African worksong tradition also adhered to other mainland and coastal occupations. The Black firemen aboard steamboats sang at their work as did the stevedores and roust-abouts of the Southern ports. Near the shore, agricultural workers sang at their labors, and so did the mule skinners and those who worked constructing and maintaining the railroad tracks. Workers in tobacco warehouses, oyster-shucking and crab-picking houses, and those under confinement—whether slaves marching in shackles or prisoners behind bars—all frequently used singing to make their work go better. All of these precedents combined to create the chanteys used by the menhaden fishermen who worked the waters from New Jersey to Texas. Catching the oily menhaden for industrial applications, these fishermen were the last actively to use chanteys. The invention of the power block, a mechanical net-puller, in the mid-1950s all but eliminated the old songs, but older fishermen continued to sing them for pleasure into the 1990s.
Michael Luster
References
Abrahams, Roger D. 1974. Deep the Water, Shallow the Shore: Three Essays on Shantying in the West Indies. Publications of the American Folklore Society Memoir Series Vol. 60. Austin: University of Texas Press. Doerflinger, William Main. 1990. Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman. rev. ed. Glenwood, IL: Meyerbooks. Hugill, Stan. 1984. Shanties from the Seven Seas: Shipboard Work-Songs and Songs Used as WorkSongs from the Great Days of Sail. 2d (abridged) ed. London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul.