The Wellerman: A Song History
"The Wellerman," also sung as "Soon May the Wellerman Come," is a New Zealand whaling song whose author and date of composition are still uncertain.[1] Its title points to the English-born Weller brothers, Joseph, George and Edward, who set up whaling and trading businesses in Sydney in 1829 and moved into New Zealand in 1831; their shore station at Ōtākou, on the Otago Peninsula, became a thriving settlement in the 1830s, with Ngāi Tahu people closely involved.[1] Explanations of the title vary: one source takes the "Wellerman" to be the vessel or skipper that kept the stations supplied and carried their oil off, while another reads it simply as a Weller Brothers employee.[2][3]
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Whalers, oil on canvas, ca. 1845. Whaling ships at sea painted around 1845, a few years after the Weller brothers' whaling station flourished in New Zealand; the painting has no connection to the song.
The song came to light through Neil Colquhoun (1929–2014), a music educator who gathered, arranged and composed folk songs of his country; he credited it to a Frank R. Woods, reportedly from a whaling family at Wairoa, whose identity has not been confirmed.[1] Accounts of its making conflict: in one, the singer Tommy Wood came across the text as a poem in an old book and, helped by Colquhoun, made a song of it, while some suspect Colquhoun wrote much of it himself.[1][3] The earliest known recording is Colquhoun's own, made for the NZBC radio series Songs of a Young Country, broadcast in October and November 1969, and described in a 2025 article by Michael Brown, music curator at the National Library of New Zealand.[1] That broadcast predates "The Lightning Tree," the 1971 theme of the British television series Follyfoot, whose chorus is similar, so the likeness is now thought coincidental.[1] Tommy Wood sang it on the LP Song of a Young Country in December 1971, and Colquhoun printed it in an anthology of the same name in 1972, though sources differ on whether an earlier printing exists.[1][2][4]
Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir and Ed Trickett recorded it for Folk-Legacy on And So Will We Yet in 1990.[2] Its global fame began when Nathan Evans, a postman from Scotland, posted it to TikTok on 28 December 2020; duets carried it to millions of viewers and helped make sea shanties an early internet craze of 2021.[1][4] A version credited to Evans with 220 Kid and Billen Ted spent a second week at Number 1 on the UK's Official Singles Chart in March 2021.[5] Ellen Pratt scores it for three dulcimers, one of them a bass part, plus chord backup, all in DAD tuning, in her self-published Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 6, a 96-page set of twelve multipart pieces.[6]
Sources
- Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision: "Soon May the Wellerman Come".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Wellerman".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Soon May the Wellerman Come".
- Otago Daily Times: "Wellerman sea shanty a global hit".
- Official Charts: "Nathan Evans' Wellerman claims second week at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart".
- Ellen Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 6".
- Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Whalers, oil on canvas, ca. 1845. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.