Articles

Research and essays on sea shanties, maritime music, and the age of sail.

Sailor Songs

Harper's New Monthly Magazine

William Alden Reprint

A journalist's detailed survey of sea shanties from the age of American packet ships, classifying them into pulling songs and windlass songs, with nineteen musical transcriptions. One of the earliest attempts to document these traditions before the last sailors who knew them were gone.

Songs of the Sailor

Oberlin Students' Monthly

Isaac Allen Reprint

An Oberlin College student draws on his time at sea to reflect on why sailors cannot work without singing, and traces the plaintive minor key of shanties to African musical traditions. A rare pre-Civil War essay on shipboard work songs, with vivid firsthand anecdotes.