Postman quits job after online craze for sea shanties
Unlikely as it may seem, sea shanties have become an online sensation in 2021 after a postman, Nathan Evans, posted one on TikTok. And now he’s entered the official UK charts and has left his job to pursue a career in music. He’s been featured in music and national press, including The Times (read the linked article for an insight into taking images in lockdown).
Evans has been posting TikTok music videos for some time. His first sea shanty went up last June and he recorded his second shanty, The Wellerman, last December. That’s now had 7.5 million views.
The track is a cover of The Longest Johns’ version of the 19th-century sea shanty Soon May The Wellerman Come.
When Evans’ rendition of The Wellerman (originally, MIN believes, a 19th-century New Zealand whaling song) caught fire, first one TikToker and then another recorded themselves singing different vocal parts on top of Evans. Within a few days, a dozen people who had never met in person, singing thousands of miles from one another during the height of a global pandemic, had recorded a beautiful tune that has been enjoyed by millions of others.
“Back in the day when the shanties were sung, it was to bring everybody together, to keep them all in time, to keep the morale high,” says Evans.
“Especially in this time when everybody’s stuck at home, they’re doing their remote working – they can join in, and it kind of brings everybody together.
“So I think it’s just kind of brought it into this day and age. It makes it feel like you’re all united. Especially seeing how creative everybody can be with it.”
While Evans is hopeful the tides of destiny will steer him toward fame and fortune, the mail carrier remains pragmatic about his prospects.
“The future will be quite bright, I hope. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it’s never going to come around again,” says Evans. “Hopefully if nothing comes of it then I can go back and continue being a postman, but I thought at the minute I’ll seize it and see what happens.”
The craze for sea shanties has widened from just Evans and his collaborators. Users have created a new genre of online content they call “shanty Tok.”
But, Gerry Smyth, an academic and musician at Liverpool John Moores University, told Business Insider that The Wellerman isn’t even a sea shanty.
“The Wellerman song which has created such a hubbub on the internet is a whaling ballad that people are singing in a particular way that suggests a shanty aesthetic, but it’s not a proper shanty, which is a call and response,” Smyth says.
“The Wellerman,” he says, is “in a format which is usually sung by a single person, and just has a chorus where more people can join in.”
Sailors developed sea shanties, which rely on the call and response, to provide a rhythm to which they should be working, pulling ropes to hoist sails and pushing pumps to drain excess water from the bilges of ships. “This work was onerous, difficult, demanding, and it required groups of men doing the same thing at the same time,” says Smyth.
Sailors drew a distinct firewall between the shanties they sung on the ships, and the communal ballads they sung on shore. “The shanties themselves are work songs, and the sailors were very superstitious about this,” says Smyth. “They only sang them when working. They didn’t when they were on a break.”
Even so, Smyth isn’t complaining too much. Now, keen to avoid missing the boat, the British Library has expedited the publication of his new guide to shanties, bringing forward its release from April to next Thursday.
Named Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas, the book presents the words and music of 40 ‘heaving or hauling’ working shanties and 10 ‘off-duty’ sea songs and ballads which Smyth has collated.
