Drunken Sailor
The song's lyrics vary, but usually contain some variant of the question, "What shall we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning?"
In some styles of performance, each successive verse suggests a method of sobering or punishing the drunken sailor.
[1] The song was sung to accompany certain work tasks aboard sailing ships, especially those that required a brisk walking pace.
It is believed to originate in the early 19th century or earlier, during a period when ships' crews, especially those of military vessels, were large enough to permit hauling a rope whilst simply marching along the deck.
With the advent of merchant packet and clipper ships and their smaller crews, which required different working methods, use of the shanty appears to have declined or shifted to other, minor tasks.
[citation needed] The first published description of the shanty is found in an account of an 1839 whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut, to the Pacific Ocean.
In Eckstorm and Smyth's collection Minstrelsy of Maine (published 1927), the editors note that one of their grandmothers, who sang the song, claimed to have heard it used during the task of tacking on the Penobscot River "probably [by the time of the editor's reportage] considerably over a hundred years ago".
[5] A five-verse set of lyrics and tune were published in the third edition of Davis and Tozer's shanty collection, Sailor Songs or 'Chanties'.
When John Masefield next published the lyrics in 1906, he called it a "bastard variety" of shanty which was "seldom used"[7][page needed]—an assertion supported by the lack of many earlier references.
He claimed that this was one of only two shanties that was sung in the British Royal Navy (where singing at work was generally frowned upon).
Moreover, the song had largely gone out of use as a "walk away" shanty when the size of ships' crews was reduced and it was no longer possible to use that working method.
After an iron ship has been twelve months at sea, there's a quite a lot of barnacles and grass grows onto her bottom.
[11] This would be in contradistinction to the much more typical "halyards shanties", which were for heavier work with an entirely different sort of pacing and formal structure.
[13] The folklorist James Madison Carpenter recorded several veteran sailors singing the song in the 1920s and 30s, which can be heard online courtesy of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
[14] "Drunken Sailor" began its life as a popular song on land at least as early as the 1900s, by which time it had been adopted as repertoire for glee singing at Eton College.
Australian composer Percy Grainger incorporated the song into his piece "Scotch Strathspey And Reel" (1924).
The glut of writings on sailors' songs and published collections that came starting in the 1920s supported a revival of interest in shanty-singing for entertainment purposes on land.
[20] The song shares the same tune with a Lent and Easter hymn, We Have A King Who Rides A Donkey which was written by Fred Kaan.
[21] The song has been widely recorded under a number of titles by a range of performers including Black Lagoon, The King's Singers, Pete Seeger, The Blaggards, U.K. Subs, The Bolokos, Malinda Kathleen Reese, Nathan Evans and The Irish Rovers.
The arrangement was first recorded by The Idlers, and has been performed by several collegiate groups over the years, including the Yale Alley Cats.
[citation needed] Pere Ubu's 1978 song "Caligari's Mirror" is a post-punk reworking of "Drunken Sailor".
[27][28] The 2019 film Fisherman's Friends, based on a true story, features a Cornish group of fishermen who sing the song en route to hitting the pop charts and touring.
[33] There she goes, swingin in the riggins[34] Hit him on the head with a drunken soldier Put him in the back of a paddy wagon (Great Big Sea) Take him to the pub and get him drunker Have you seen the Captain's Daughter?
Make him sing in an Irish Rock band (Sevon Rings) Lock him in a room with disco music (Schooner Fare – Finnegan's Wake) Don't let him drive/steer/near that cargo freighter.
