Drunken Sailor: A Song History
"Drunken Sailor," catalogued as Roud 322, is a walkaway or "stamp and go" shanty in which the crew asks over and over what is to be done with a sailor who is drunk, and answers with a string of mostly unkind remedies.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives 1841 as its earliest date.[1] That year Francis Allyn Olmsted published Incidents of a Whaling Voyage, his journal of an 1839 voyage from New London, Connecticut, aboard the whaler North America; it prints, with its tune, a hauling song whose sail-rising refrain matches this shanty's chorus, and Olmsted remarks that such songs worked well when a long line of men hauled together.[2]
Winslow Homer, Crew of U.S. Steamsloop "Colorado," Shipped at Boston, June 1861 (from "Harper's Weekly," Vol. 5, p. 439), wood engraving, July 13, 1861. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The author of the shanty book Capstan Bars, as summarized by the Ballad Index, judged it fairly recent, since walking a light sail aloft needed a big ship with plenty of deck room, and remembered it as a shanty not often sung.[1] It nevertheless turns up in a long list of shanty collections, among them Cecil Sharp's English Folk Chanteys, Joanna Colcord's Songs of American Sailormen, Frederick Pease Harlow's Chanteying Aboard American Ships, Richard Runciman Terry's The Shanty Book, and Stan Hugill's Shanties from the Seven Seas, which gives two texts and two tunes.[1] The song also went ashore: it was collected as a play-party song in Indiana and, as "Up She Rises," in the southern Appalachians, as a ball-bouncing rhyme in Australia, and in a Utah version about a drunken miner.[1]
Peter Kennedy recorded the Cadgwith Fishermen's Chorus singing it in Cornwall in 1956, and Stan Hugill himself sang it at the Paimpol sea-song festival in Brittany in 1991; later recordings range from the Spinners and Fisherman's Friends to Nathan Evans in 2022.[3] Bing Futch includes it in Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 7), a set of sixteen flatpicking-friendly tunes for mountain dulcimer that comes with demonstration and backing tracks.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Drunken Sailor, The (Early in the Morning)".
- Internet Archive: "Francis Allyn Olmsted, Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (1841)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?".
- Bing Futch: "Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 7)".
- Image: Winslow Homer, Crew of U.S. Steamsloop "Colorado," Shipped at Boston, June 1861 (from "Harper's Weekly," Vol. 5, p. 439), wood engraving, July 13, 1861. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.