Welcome to the Endless Knot! So, I’ve been sitting on an
interesting linguistic fact about sea shanties for a few years,
and now suddenly sea shanties are everywhere! There’s been an explosion of interest in sea
shanties, particularly one called “Soon May the Wellerman Come” on TikTok. Actually,
technically “Wellerman” isn’t exactly a sea shanty (as Adam Neely makes clear in a recent video),
but this fact IS about sea shanties, and it’s part of a larger story that I put out a video about a
few months ago, the story of where the word and the instrument guitar came from, which ended
with the particular importance of the guitar to rock & roll, and I have a follow up video coming
out later this year about the origin of rock & roll. And that’s where the sea shanties come in.
The phrase rock & roll has been around much longer than rock & roll music itself. Rocking
and rolling has been used since at least the 17th century to refer to the motion of a ship at sea,
reflecting both the forward-and-backward rocking and side-to-side rolling motions. It was then
picked up metaphorically with sexual connotations in, believe it or not, sea shanties — they were
already using the phrase to refer to the ship’s motion after all. So for instance
in the song “Johnny Boker” is the line “Oh do, my Johnny Boker, Come rock and roll me over,
Do, my Johnny Boker, do”, which, to my knowledge anyway, is the earliest connection between the
phrase rock & roll and music. Sea shanties, by the way, are a type of work song, sung by the sailors
as they do their work aboard ship. Work songs are a common phenomenon, found in many cultures,
times, and contexts, as they help to regulate the rhythms of the labour and keep everyone in time,
and the work songs sung by enslaved Africans on the plantations in the American south,
along with being one of the possible influences on the development of sea shanties themselves,
led to the the blues, and eventually to rock & roll. And this is why sea shanties, blues,
and rock & roll all often feature the call and response, which served the functional role of
regulating the rhythm by following the lead of the caller. The word shanty, by the way,
first attested in 1856 long after the origin of the genre itself though likely used for some time
in sailor jargon before it was ever written down, probably comes from comes from French chantez
“sing”, the plural imperative of chanter “to sing”, from Latin cantare “to sing”,
from the Proto-Indo-European root *kan- “to sing”. Spellings with both the and are found,
the reflecting the French spelling, and the reflecting the French pronunciation,
though the may also reflect the influence of the other unrelated word shanty meaning a
“crude hut” or perhaps even an attempt at making the word look less French.
As for “Johnny Boker”, it exists in a number of different versions, including a fiddle folksong
version that has nothing to do with the sea and has little in common with the sea shanty version.
The sea shanty version is probably most popularly known from its use in the video game Assassin’s
Creed IV: Black Flag. Originally it seems to have served the purpose of setting the time
when pulling an anchor free from mud, which would make it a short drag shanty appropriate for quick
jobs that required a strong heave, as opposed to a halyard shanty for more prolonged work. Who Johnny
Boker might be is unknown, but one suggestion is that the name is connected with an obscure 19th c.
British parlour song called “Johnny Poker”. So sea shanties and rock & roll share some
characteristics because they share some history. And to highlight this,
I now present to you my own version of the first “rock & roll” song, “Johnny Boker”!