The Songs
The bulk of the songs that The Fisherman’s Friends perform are rooted way back in the past, hundreds of years in some cases, and date back to the great days of sail. The wooden ships and boats of the merchant, whaling and fishing fleets were crewed by large teams of mostly young men, whose collective hard endeavors were required to complete the onerous, repetitive and physically-demanding on board tasks.
To ensure an efficiency in that collective effort, the work songs, chanteys, or shanties as they became known, evolved as a means by which to coordinate the efforts of the large teams of sailors. A shanty man was employed to call out the line of a shanty and create a rhythm, and in response the crew would sing out and make a unified heaver haul or push, a pull or a drag, and constant repetition of this would enable them to maybe turn the capstan to haul up the anchor, or to work the pumps, or perhaps to hoist the heavy canvas sails aloft.
By ensuring the content of the shanty or song was testosterone-fueled, or patriotic or triumphant, or ribald or perhaps filthy(certainly hugely inappropriate by today’s standards), morale was maintained and the mind focused on the energy-sapping tasks. It was said that a good shanty man was worth his weight in gold, and on many ships it became the specialized role for an older or perhaps less physically able sailor.
From the lyrics, much of what mattered to the sailors becomes apparent –the girls they left behind, the girls in the next port, the lovely girls, the not-so-lovely girls, the brave captains, the not-so-brave captains, kind captains and cruel captains, battles in which they had fought, and storms they had endured, all sung by young men who, even by today’s standards, were well-traveled and worldly-wise.
Some songs bear witness to historical events–the shanties General Taylor and Santiana laud the two protagonists of the Mexican American wars of the early 1800s, respectively Zachary Taylor and Antonio Lopez Dos Santiana, whilst A Drop of Nelson’s Blood, as well as being a call to be steadfast and take courage, referred to the grand state funeral of England’s greatest hero. And from the simplest, most basic form of shanty, it was also possible to trace back to an even earlier age –Hanging Johnny is believed to reference Jack Ketch, Judge Jefferies’ brutal sidekick at the Bloody Assizes in 1685, and the precursor of the puppet introduced into the Punchanillo (Punch and Judy) entertainments of the late seventeenth century when they arrived here from Italy.
The lyrical content and musical style of the songs often reflected the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of the ship’s crews. In the great American novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville has almost thirty different nationalities aboard the Pequod, and the validity of the story is testament to the fact that he had crewed aboard a number of whaling ships himself. In the songs, it is possible to find traces of the musical traditions of Africa, the Americas, Ireland,Celtic and non-Celtic Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, Polynesia,the Mediterranean,anywhere at all in fact from whence sailors originated.
The shanties and songs themselves became little cameos of the makeups of the ship’s crew. As sailors moved around from one ship to another, so the songs would travel with them, from ocean to ocean, around and around the world, probably changing on each and every leg of every journey, in an aural tradition that was an organic and multi-ethnic cultural melting pot.Though nowadays many folk purists believe that the original song form should be strictly adhered to,the fact remains that the song’s original form, musically and lyrically, was a fluid and evolving affair and not the property of anyone, rather the property of everyone, and that is the crucial aspect of their beauty and appeal.
