History of shanties
The term 'shanty' today is taken to mean any song with a maritime theme but that was not always the case. In the days of wooden sailing ships the songs that sailors sang fell into two groups: shanties and forebitters.
Shanties
3 slip, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham
Shanties were work songs sung by merchant seamen while carrying out routine tasks that required a working party to co-ordinate their efforts for maximum use of force by using the tempo of the tune. Halyard shanties were for hauling together on a rope. Capstan shanties were for tramping around the capstan, pushing on the bars to raise the anchor. Pumping shanties – well, the clue is in the title!
As these tasks needed different rhythms the type of shanty can often be told by the speed and tempo of the tune.
Royal Navy sailors did not sing working shanties partly because with far larger crews than merchant ships they didn’t need to co-ordinate their manpower, but mostly because officers thought that singing shanties was prejudicial to discipline and there was too much risk of coded references that mocked the officers. However, both Merchant and Royal Navy sailors sang:
Forebitters
When sailors were off duty they would gather either below decks in their quarters, the ‘fo’c’sle, or above decks by the forebitts. A very popular entertainment was the singing of songs and playing of tunes. These songs were known as ‘forebitters’.
Forebitters were purely for entertainment, not for working, but are often confused with shanties due to the use of similar lyrics and/or tunes and they were often adopted from the working shanties. However, they were always sung to a tempo that was impossible to work to, usually because it was too fast.
Other forebitters had their origins in the penny ballads, broadsheets, and music hall songs penned (often by landsmen) to commemorate famous naval victories and disasters, often in satire. There is also a category of forebitters that contain little or no reference to maritime life, being simply popular songs of the eighteenth century that were taken up by sailors.
In addition, today we have modern songs about maritime life written by modern authors, perhaps with personal or family experience of the sea – or none at all!