♪ A pirate's life is a wonderful life ♪
♪ A-rovin' over the sea ♪
- Songs like "A Pirate's Life for Me"-
♪ Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me ♪
- And "Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest"
are as prevalent to pirate lore
as eye patches or treasure maps.
♪ Fifteen men on a dead man's chest ♪
- We associate these songs with pirates
because of Robert Lewis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island",
published more than 100 years
after the golden age of piracy.
Stevenson himself actually made up the chorus
to "Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest".
So what did pirate music actually sound like?
I'm Joel Cook, and this is "Rogue History"!
[dramatic music]
Sea shanties are a good place to start
when it comes to discussing music on board vessels.
We're not alone in thinking so,
since videos tagged #seashanty
have gotten over 7 billion plays on TikTok.
On the open sea,
shanties helped facilitate the timing and pace of labor,
not to mention the songs provided a distraction
from the arduous tasks at hand.
- Typically at moments
when sailors needed to synchronize their labor
to furl or unfurl sails, they needed to work in unison.
For the main sail,
you could have a dozen people pulling at one time,
so a rhythmic song was actually quite helpful.
♪ Heave away, my Johnny ♪
♪ Heave away ♪
- The sea shanties we think of today were not documented
until the 19th century,
when they were mostly sung aboard cargo and whaling vessels.
Although it's worth mentioning
that the boundaries between pirates and sailors
often overlapped and changed,
so it's possible that it occurred without record.
"Blow, Boys, Blow" is a haul yard shanty
named after the line they would pull to raise the sail.
The crew would know to pull
each time they heard the word blow.
♪ I long to hear you blow, boys, blow ♪
- Aside from some crude sing outs,
we don't have physical evidence
of work songs being sung on pirate vessels.
A sing out is not an elaborate shanty like "The Wellerman",
but more so a simple "yo-ho, heave-ho".
- Heave! Ho!
- If we go back a little further,
there were early naval traditions
in the US, Great Britain, and elsewhere
of using drum cadences,
sometimes accompanied by fife or fiddle,
to set the pace for shipboard work.
This tradition can be found as far back
as the Ancient Greek triremes.
Since many pirates were ex-navy sailors,
it's possible that they may have also been used
aboard some pirate ships.
These cadences would've sound something like this.
[rhythmic fife and drum music]
We also have evidence that pirates sang sea songs
in hours of relaxation.
They were about romance, adventure,
or just variations of popular songs of the era.
♪ Pirates life sounds just right ♪
♪ Sounds quite nice, I could say that twice ♪
♪ Sounds quite nice ♪
♪ We won't live long [yodels] ♪
- We think of pirate's lives as constantly exciting,
but we have to remember
how different the world was back then.
They had to entertain themselves
sometimes for days or weeks on end.
- Sometimes music could be used purely for entertainment
to keep crews becoming unruly because of boredom at sea.
Pirates actually sometimes kidnapped sailors
who they knew could play musical instruments
to keep them entertained.
And it was also not uncommon to steal instruments.
- Ballads were one way for seafarers to entertain themselves
and share their stories.
One of the most famous examples from the 19th century,
"The Flying Cloud", depicts the darker side
of a pirate's life.
♪ There's gold and silver to be had ♪
♪ If with me you'll remain ♪
♪ We'll hoist the pirate flag aloft ♪
♪ And scour the Spanish Main ♪
- These were primarily the product
of professional songwriters
who published popular songs that related to the latest news,
written in verse and set to music.
There was a famous pirate in the golden age,
Captain Henry Every, who has been accredited
with writing a ballad about himself in 1694.
- He led a mutiny off the coast of Spain
and he took his crew on a remarkably successful plunder raid
in the Indian Ocean.
But before he left Spain,
he actually penned his own ballad describing his intentions
and he defended his own actions and mutiny at sea.
And the ballad actually made itself up
to the highest court in England
as evidence of Every's decision to become a pirate.
And the ballad actually got published and became very famous
and became actually a very popular song sung
by the middle of the 1690s.
- Although Every claimed to have written the ballad himself,
some musicologists say that it's very possible
that he hired a professional songwriter.
All we have to go off is the lyrics.
The ballad has not been preserved in oral tradition
and the tune has been lost.
So just like Hollywood films
don't tell a complete version of history,
make sure to check out our first episode,
neither do these sea shanties and songs.
They don't truly capture how pirate music sounded.
However, in large part thanks
to the work of folklorists like Alan Lomax,
we can get a rough idea of what they may have sounded like.
Lomax recruited actual sailors to sing these songs,
such as this recording of "Haul on the Bowline",
sung by Captain Richard Maitland.
♪ Kitty is my darling ♪
♪ Haul on the bowline, the bowline haul ♪
- These recordings suggests that the songs
and the work may have moved at a slower, more measured pace
than the brisk, rousing tempo we hear on TikTok today.
But where did shanties originate from?
In his book "Villains of All Nations",
Marcus Rediker describes the well-known similarities of form
between African songs and sea shanties.
And another book, "Black Salt" by Ray Costello,
notes that it's often hard to tell
whether in some shanties we are dealing
with a European tune that's been Africanized
or an African tune that's been slightly Europeanized.
And it's no coincidence
that sea shanties bear striking resemblances
to songs sung by enslaved people in the Caribbean.
The very practice of shantying,
which derives from the French word chanter, or to sing,
may have its roots in the interaction
of sailors and Black dock workers.
These songs developed at first as songs sung
while loading cargo using newly-invented machines,
like the cotton screw and the pump break windlass.
These songs' rhythms were designed to match the effort
required to operate these machines.
♪ Oh heave away and sing this song ♪
♪ Storm along, my stormies ♪
- The musical call and response form
found in both shanties and African work songs
is known as antiphony.
♪ Whoa ♪
- And it makes sense
it made its way onto the 19th century merchant ships
that also had workers who needed their labor synchronized.
♪ Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down ♪
♪ [To me!] Wey hey, blow the man down. ♪
- These crews often had people of many diverse backgrounds
who all spoke different languages.
The songs not only brought them together,
but it taught everyone certain words and phrases
they needed to know to function together as a crew.
- So it would not be uncommon
for a ship to have English, French,
Dutch, sometimes Spanish,
and sometimes enslaved African peoples on board a ship
who needed to communicate with each other
and actually work effectively in handling the ship,
particularly during storms or difficult weather.
And so they would have that technical language
that would be understood
by people coming from different backgrounds
and it would allow them
to actually perform tasks quickly and efficiently.
- The influence of shanties and antiphony can still be heard
in contemporary music.
♪ When I say ooh, you say ahh ♪
♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪
- DJ Kool, the Who...
♪ People try to put us down ♪
♪ Talkin' 'bout my generation ♪
Redbone...
♪ Hail ♪
♪ Nothin' the matter ♪
To this day, we use music as a communal experience
or to get us through hard times, to work,
or to even when we're just bored,
so the way pirates used music isn't that different
from the way that we do.
So if we use music the way pirates did,
does that make us pirates?
No, probably not.
Unless, of course, you used Napster
or Limewire back in the day.
[shanty fiddle music]
♪