#Weatherman song sea shanty for free
#Weatherman song sea shanty update

Towards the end of 2020, The Longest Johns allowed Twitch streamers to use their music for free in the background of their streams, and one song in particular exploded: Wellerman.

The band, comprising of Jonathan 'JD' Darley, Andy Yates, Robbie Sattin and Dave Robinson, have spent the last eight years performing sea shanties at festivals across the UK and had garnered a small but loyal fanbase. MORE: Viral internet sensations that became huge chart hits The version by The Longest Johns was recorded in late 2019, when the sea shanty trend first kicked off online. The song itself is a classic sea shanty, written and sung by the crews of whaling boats working for the biggest whaling and export company out of New Zealand, named Weller.

#Weatherman song sea shanty update

The movement is now sending the song that started it all into the mainstream a recording of Wellerman by Bristonian band The Longest Johns is currently at Number 33 on the Official UK Singles Chart in the latest update (January 18). Within days, shanties had overtaken the social media platform and become a global online obsession, known as ShantyTok, with people posting their own sea shanties and memes. The movement has been gathering pace over the past few months but went stratospheric at the end of last year when 26-year-old postman and musician Nathan Evans, from Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, posted a video of himself on TikTok performing popular sea shanty Wellerman. Read the original article.Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you'll be aware that sea shanties are the latest global music trend sparked by TikTok. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Understanding the context behind these songs enables us to move beyond the visceral pleasures of communal performance and towards a more nuanced view of the world, encouraging us to consider what has changed since the days of the Wellerman.Īdrian York, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music Performance, University of Westminster In a world riven by competing ideologies, drowning in fake news and with many people’s lives on hold because of COVID, it isn’t surprising that joining an online community to harmonise a melody and lyric that reaches back to a simpler if more brutal past, has many attractions. It can be seen as a genuine cultural expression by exploited workers for whom “sugar and tea and rum” provided a much-needed respite from the drudgery and toil of their daily lives. But it is apparent from an analysis of the lyrics that the song is neither a post-colonial type of critique nor an embrace of the exploitation of indigenous peoples or the slave trade. There has been some debate on social media about the “problematic” nature of these references. The chorus lyric begins: “Soon may the Wellerman come, To bring us sugar and tea and rum.” These were products that were brought back from what was known as “ The triangular trade”, with enslaved Africans having been sold to work on plantations in North America and the Caribbean and the commodities being brought back on the return leg. But there is darkness embedded in the song. There is an innocence and integrity about Nathan Evans’ performance and most of the responses to it. However, the song also has six verses that tell the tale of a 40-day whaling expedition by a ship named the Billy of Tea and its crew’s struggles to land a particularly fractious whale. Wellerman shares many characteristics of the shanty: its call-and-response form, strong pulse and a melodic structure that rises and falls, rather like a wave. Whaling songs, on the other hand, seem to have emerged out of the shanty tradition with the addition of a folk-ballad narrative structure. London Review of Books January 15, 2021 Indeed, the ‘very practice of shantying may have its roots in the interaction of sailors and black dockworkers.’ on the Haitian revolution: It isn’t a coincidence that British sea shanties ‘bear striking resemblances to Caribbean slave songs’. These sea shanties have a strong rhythmic flow and a call-and-response structure, with the call being sung by the “shantyman”, a lead sailor who would cue up each task with a specific song. This practice was also adopted by merchant sailors when performing specific tasks on sailing vessels, such as pulling ropes and hoisting anchors. Enslaved people working on southern plantations would replicate African traditions of singing songs to accompany their work. Shanties show the clear influence of the African-American tradition of work-songs.