Drunken Sailor

(A Runaway Chorus; Early in the Morning)

About the song

As a true work-song, this shanty would have originally been used in ships with very large crews,

when it was possible to grasp a halyard and stamp away up the deck, the sail steadily ascending the mast, with all hands roaring out the song in unison.

In merchant ships of later days, usage was confined to the job of going "about ship" manning and stamping away with the braces to rotate sails. Captain Maitland recorded its use as follows:

Now this is a song that's usually sung when men are walking away with the slack of a rope, generally when the iron ships are scrubbing their bottom. After an iron ship has been twelve months at sea, there's a quite a lot of barnacles and grass grows onto her bottom. And generally, in the calm latitudes, up in the horse(?) latitudes in the North Atlantic Ocean, usually they rig up a purchase for to scrub the bottom. You can't do it when the ship is going over three miles an hour, but less than that, of course, you can do so. But it all means a considerable walking, not much labor, but all walking. And they have a song called ' The Drunken Sailor' that comes in for that.

It is one of the oldest known shanties. The earliest printed version of this famous song seems to be in Francis Allyn Olmsted's 1841 Incidents of a Whaling Voyage. It was sung by the British sailors of the "Honorable John (East India) Company".

Captain Whall records that this song and Cheer'ly Men were about the only songs allowed in the Royal Service, and even then they were permitted only occasionally.

Frank Shay first heard it in the early 1900s as part of a New York National Guard drill and, later, as a conga dance tune.

Variations: chorus and mode

The chorus is a matter of minor disagreement, with nearly every author opting for a different articulation:

  • Olmsted (1841) wrote: Ho! Ho! and up she rises
  • Capt. Masefield (1906) wrote: Way, hay, there she rises
  • Capt. Whall (1910) wrote: Hoo-rah! and up she rises
  • Bullen (1914) wrote: Hoo-ray an' up she rises
  • Sharp (1915) wrote: Way-ay and up she rises
  • Hugill wrote: Way, hay, an' up she rises! Patent blocks o' diff'rent sizes
  • Shay wrote: way, hay, there she rises

Cecil Sharp, in English Folk-Chanteys (1915), says the tune familiar to him is obviously a bagpipe air in a six-note mode. He notes that Tozer prints a major version, Whall records a dorian, but that Bullen's mixolydian variant may be the most common. Hugill says "the tune is from a traditional Irish air".

  • Early is usually pronounced ear-lye, a custom traditional among shore singers of English folksingers and recorded by early shanty collectors. Nevertheless, some early recordings eschewed this pronunciation.