Music in 18th Century Britain Conference

Did Shanties Begin in the 18th Century? Rethinking Dibdin’s Sailors and Maritime Song

Sea shanties are widely assumed to be a product of the nineteenth century, emerging from transatlantic maritime labour to form the work song repertoire of the merchant sailor. Scholarship often stresses the lack of concrete evidence for shanty singing before the Napoleonic era, leading to the view that the practice did not exist in Britain during the eighteenth century. This paper challenges that assumption by re-examining the work of Charles Dibdin, whose prolific output of songs for the stage and for the Admiralty offers striking resonances with later shanty traditions. Through close analysis of Dibdin’s nautical ballads and theatrical songs – works that were explicitly framed as representations of British seafaring life – I argue that Dibdin drew upon, and in turn helped codify, vernacular traditions of maritime work song. His texts and musical idioms point to…