Sea Shanties Were Work Tools: Mobile Bay Cotton Screwers and the Dead Horse

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The viral sea shanty craze got the history wrong: most of the songs, including The Wellerman, are not shanties, and 18th century pirates never sang them. A shanty was strictly a work song, sung without instruments in call and response, led by a shantyman who acted as a foreman timing the crew's effort. Leisure songs in the forecastle were forebitters. The Royal Navy banned singing at work, keeping time with fifes, fiddles, and the bosun's pipe and relying on huge crews. Shanties arose after the War of 1812, when fast packet and clipper ships on tight commercial schedules sailed with far smaller crews that had to coordinate every pull.

The structure came from African American work songs. At ports like Mobile Bay, a shanty mart, Black stevedores sang to time cotton screwing, jacking bales into ship holds, and white sailors working winters ashore picked up the form. Hauling shanties timed pulls on ropes, while heaving shanties kept a steady pace at capstans and pumps. Steam winches ended the tradition, and collectors such as Cecil Sharp and Stan Hugill cleaned up the lyrics and downplayed the African American roots.

Long drag shanties built a pause for the crew to reset their grip before one synchronized pull on the final beat.
Short drag shanties drove quick successive pulls for sudden sail adjustments in storms.
Sailors spent their month's advance ashore, then worked off the dead horse unpaid for their first month at sea.
When the debt cleared, crews hoisted a straw and canvas horse to a heaving shanty and cut it loose into the sea.
An 1880s writer lamented that singing and steam are irreconcilable.

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