Folk Songs of the Sea

The repertoire of forecastle songs, ballads, and shanties carried by sailing-ship crews, distinct from work shanties in that they were sung for leisure off-watch. The Englishman Cecil Sharp collected sea songs in the early 1900s alongside his wider folk-song fieldwork, and Stan Hugill’s “Shanties from the Seven Seas” (1961) remains the standard documentary collection of the genre, drawn from his own service under sail. The tradition overlaps the work shanty but includes narrative ballads, homeward-bound songs, and laments not tied to a hauling or capstan task.