Harwich Shanty Festival 2025: Singing the Sea in a Town Steeped in Maritime Memory

After many years of intending to go, I finally made it to the Harwich Shanty Festival this October – and the experience more than justified the journey. I had never been to Harwich before: a curious, compact town whose layered maritime past remains strikingly visible in its streets, harbour, and historic vessels. The festival itself seems to animate those histories, filling the town with sound and song.

Over the course of the weekend I heard an impressive range of performers. Hog Eye Men offered particularly accomplished renditions, combining precise harmonies with a strong sense of character. Motley Crew brought infectious energy, while the Dovercourt Ukulele Club delighted their audience with Bonnie Ship the Diamond, played with both charm and conviction.

From the Netherlands, De Kaapstander gave a notably polished and well-rehearsed performance. Their tone and ensemble work were excellent, though the choice of venue - a church - felt a little incongruous for sea songs that originated on the decks of working ships. Even so, the setting lent the performance a kind of reverence that complemented their musical discipline.

Mains’l Haul and Shantyfolk created more participatory atmospheres. With Shantyfolk, I joined in on Rio Grande, The Leaving of Liverpool and A Drop of Nelson's Blood - the latter of which was sung at an exhilaratingly brisk tempo. There was a real sense of communal pleasure in these moments: the songs functioning not as relics of labour, but as living acts of collective memory.

As a Suffolk native, I was especially taken by the Orwellermen, whose repertoire drew on the distinctive maritime and rural traditions of East Anglia. Their performance aboard the LV18, a preserved lightship moored in Harwich harbour, felt apt and evocative. Though the vessel itself was not a sailing ship - and never a site of shanty-singing - the juxtaposition of historic vessel and traditional song underscored the festival’s broader project of reimagining maritime heritage in situ.

An unexpected theme of the weekend was the recurrence of Pull Down Below, a shanty I have long admired but rarely encountered live. I heard it several times, perhaps reflecting its recent revival - possibly linked to The Longest Johns’ recording of the song, which was recently released. Its renewed popularity suggests how the repertoire continues to evolve through both live and digital circulation, with professional recordings feeding back into community practice.

For me, attending the festival in person was invaluable. My current research examines how maritime song functions in contemporary contexts: how repertoire is selected, how singers interpret and embody material, and how audiences participate. Hearing these songs performed, and observing the social dynamics around them, offers insights that no recording or archival source can convey. The physicality of performance, the interplay between familiarity and improvisation, the way singers manage tempo and texture to invite participation - all of these are central to understanding shanties as living tradition rather than static artefact. The festival space, with its mix of formal concerts and spontaneous singing, provides a kind of ethnographic microcosm of revivalist practice.

On a personal level, the moment that stayed with me most was hearing The Keelers in conversation at the Masonic Hall. Their reflections on Stan Hugill - the self-proclaimed 'last shantyman' - were, naturally, great to hear, but it was their singing that truly astonished. Their performance of Shiny-O was particularly memorable: the kind of unforced, resonant harmony that silences a room. It was, for me, the highlight of the festival.

I was only able to stay briefly - work and writing commitments called me back to my desk -but I left Harwich with the sound of voices still ringing in my ears. The festival’s power lies in its capacity to bridge scholarship, performance and lived tradition. For anyone studying maritime song, such gatherings are not simply sites of entertainment, but of knowledge production, representing a place where history is continually re-performed, re-heard and re-imagined.

Dr. Mollie Carlyle

Harwich Shanty Festival 2025