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In the final week of 2020, Nathan Evans, a 26-year-old Scottish postman and aspiring musician, shared a video of himself on TikTok, singing a slum called ‘Soon May the Wellerman Come’. He wasn’t expecting anything, but the app has a way of turning dusty esoteric into viral gold.
Indeed, over the past two weeks, his ancient video has been shared and played thousands of times: by professional singers and instrumentalists, sea enthusiasts, electronic beatmakers, memers, a Kermit the Frog puppet, and Moreover.
“Without TikTok, I would be so bored and claustrophobic,” Evans said via Zoom. “But it can make you feel like you have a band. You can collaborate with other people and make friends so easily. “
What is a slum?
One of the original goals of the slum was to create a sense of community and shared goals. On merchant ships in the 1700s and 1800s, a sailor sang to the sailors as they worked, distracting them from their toil, enlivening their tasks and establishing a rhythm.
“The different types of work and tasks on board would have different barracks,” said Gerry Smyth, professor of Irish cultural history at John Moores University in Liverpool and author of “Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas. “
According to Mr. Smyth’s research, barracks have evolved to match and speed up particular tasks. “If you were carrying sail, for example, the slum was designed around the physical effort required to get there,” he said. “Everyone was shooting at the same time,” he added, guided by the beat of the song.
The first shipyards could be as old as the navigation itself. They tap into the story-sharing impulse of oral literature, which is even older.
The singing is fun and lifted the morale of the sailors, Mr Smyth said. The songs also offered a common language to multinational teams.
“This community aesthetic really goes back to a very ancient time,” Mr. Smyth said. “When we sit around the campfire, we talk about the hunt. We get our identity through community, through the underlying beating of the drum. In these ancient traditions of storytelling, everyone knew the story and played a role in its storytelling.
Other work songs ran on the same shared storytelling impulse. This is especially apparent in the tradition of African American folk and spiritual song calls and responses, which drew on the democratic participation practices of sub-Saharan public life.
For the songs of the sea, the passage of time has led to some revision. In Victorian and Edwardian times, researchers who collected sea songs cleaned up the lyrics, much of which was rather “debauchery,” Smyth said. These collectors perfected the songs, replacing “whores” with “beautiful girls”, removing foul language and toning down drunken pub nights.
In versions that are most faithful to the life and language of sailors, these ballads have focused on what Mr. Smyth calls “the fundamental coordinates of the imaginary shantytown”: arriving in port and returning to sea. In the vast blue, they found a romanticized life of toil and violence. Back on dry land, their sons featured pimps, prostitutes, and intoxicated sailors losing their wages at the bar and backstage dice games.
About this slum
The recently popularized “Soon May the Wellerman Come” – which The Longest Johns group covered in 2018 – leaves out those naughty tales in favor of a “Moby-Dick” whaling adventure. His subject matter was real: The Weller Brothers’ whaling company had an outpost in Otago, New Zealand. The song’s lyrics feature sailors harpooning a whale and hoisting it to the ship for slaughter.
“This well could have been a breathtaking slum” or a song the men sang as they slaughtered a whale, said Michael P. Dyer, maritime curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.
This particular task was complicated; harvesting whale parts – oil for lighting lamps and use in cosmetics, baleen for whalebone corsets, tongue for food – was hard work. The “tonguing” that is mentioned in the lyrics refers to the withdrawal of the tongue, the most edible part of the whale, according to Mr. Dyer.
As for the line “to bring us sugar and tea and rum”, some believe it could refer to the role of whaling in the triangle of the Atlantic slave trade. (As a result, various commentators have suggested that the meme has lost its charm.) Others believe the phrase refers to another ship coming to supply the whalers on their long hunt.
“Wellerman” is not really a slum, “said David Coffin, folk musician and music teacher in Cambridge, Mass. It’s a whaling song with the beat of a slum,” he said. he says, but his purpose is that of a ballad – to tell a story, not to help sailors keep time.
In any case, the form, Mr Smyth said, is malleable, which could explain the thousands of riffs, duets and adaptations that have proliferated online. Some people even started covering popular songs – like “All Star”, from Smash Mouth – in a slum pace.
“It’s not the beauty of the song that attracts people,” Coffin said. “It’s energy.”
“It’s one of the things I love about sea huts,” he added. “Accessibility. You don’t have to be a skilled singer to sing on it. You are not supposed to sing pretty.
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