British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference

“A Pot-pourri of British, American, French, German, and other Foreign Shanties”: Dissemination of Sea Shanties across a Global Music Network

While shanties are more commonly associated with Anglo-American tradition, further research into the songs sung in a shipboard setting shows that their origins are far more varied than one would have originally thought. The practice of shantying can be found in almost every seafaring nation and the songs themselves are remarkably similar – even down to the choice of repertoire. If one were to visit a maritime music festival in Poland in the present day, for instance, one would immediately recognise several of the songs that were being sung, translated into the native language for the purposes of engagement and resonance with its intended Eastern European audience. Throughout literature on the subject, shanties are often referred to as the first global music phenomenon, where port cities across the ocean functioned…