There is a peculiar silence at the heart of maritime musicology. We know, with considerable precision, the names of the ships, the names of the captains, the names of the merchants who chartered them. What we do not know — what has been, with remarkable consistency, not recorded — is who wrote the songs.
The haul-bowline, the halyard shanty, the capstan song: these were functional objects before they were musical ones. The coordination required by the block-and-tackle systems of a square-rigged vessel demanded that dozens of men exert maximum force at precisely the same moment. The song was not entertainment. It was engineering.
The Architecture of the Work Song
A haul shanty has a specific mechanical requirement built into its structure. The shantyman — the lead singer, often the only one with melodic freedom — would carry the verse. The crew responded on the haul. That moment of response was the moment of force. The rhythm of the song was the rhythm of the work itself.
Haul, bowline — haul!
Haul on the bowline, the fore and main-top bowline
Haul, bowline — haul!
The shantyman held an unusual position in the ship's hierarchy. He had no authority over the sails or the cargo. Yet without him, the ship moved less efficiently. The best shantymen were paid slightly more, fed slightly better, and worked slightly less hard with their hands. Their instrument was their voice; their product was co-ordinated labour.
The shanty was not art. It was a tool. The fact that it became art tells us something important about what tools can become when human beings make them.
— Meridian, The Sunday SailorThe Question of Authorship
When folklorists began collecting shanties in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they were working from memory, from fragments sung by retired sailors in dockside pubs. What they found was a tradition without authors — not because no one had made these songs, but because the concept of authorship had no meaning in the context where the songs were created. A capstan shanty belonged to the crew that sang it, to the voyage that shaped it, to the ocean that demanded it.
The music industry's encounter with this tradition is a story worth examining carefully. The shanty revival — from the folk clubs of the 1950s to TikTok's 2021 phenomenon — has generated considerable revenue. Publishers, labels, streaming platforms: each has found ways to attach ownership to music made in deliberate opposition to the concept of ownership.