It does seem that shanties are having a moment. One of my favourites is ‘The Bonnie Ship the Diamond’, which featured on an ‘energetic’ playlist that I made for myself. One sleepy afternoon a few months back I had a lot of work to do in Excel, and this song really helped.
It struck me as interesting that I was wrestling with a spreadsheet when this particular song was in my ears, and in a particularly hot-blooded arrangement. Many old songs give you information about how people used to earn a living, and this one is particularly exuberant about it, determinedly jolly in the face of the dangers of whaling life. You hear the insistent words ‘let your hearts never fail’ over and over again as the chorus comes around, and the final stanza looks forward to the lads getting home and perhaps becoming fathers before too long. (Few things are more fun than the joyous ways in which folksongs communicate naughtiness).
Like most of us, these lads are working because they need to earn money; they have financial goals (‘and money to our name’). They want a satisfying personal life and some kind of domesticity. It’s sobering, however, to consider that the risks of the job were such that you needed stirring songs like this one to get through. I can’t imagine many stirring songs surviving two hundred years hence on the subject of Excel and SQL, however exciting you manage to make your queries in the latter. Of course, clerical work has a history and culture of its own, from the monks who made those medieval manuscripts to Dickens’s paper-pushers, but it’s not quite the same as raucous songs sung by hearty seamen.