![]() This takes us right to the heart of this kind of singing: creativity and taking part. Traditional song is often thought of as a stable, unchanging inheritance from a bygone age, but much of its value is in the personal and social process through which we create, sing and pass on songs. Taking part in communal traditions can help us get us through. But it does show that in these days of isolation and separation we all need connection. Watch: Woman hits toll plaza staff member when asked to pay, she hits backįew people would have imagined that a 19th-century sea song from New Zealand would be the number one song in the United Kingdom music charts the first week in February. ![]() Watch: Indian folk dance performed at Vogue magazine’s 130th anniversary party in New York.Podcast: Aliens, Lata Mangeshkar and other tales of India’s second Five-Year plan.What today’s Hindi supremacists could learn from a ‘Hinglish’ poem by ‘the father of modern Hindi’.‘A veritable army upon the high seas’: Manohar Malgonkar on how Shivaji built the Maratha Navy.‘Shantaram’ trailer: Charlie Hunnam leads web series based on the Gregory David Roberts novel.Why Ghulam Nabi Azad’s new party has been met with scepticism in Kashmir.Why did Mughal emperor Jahangir issue these rare and singular astrology-themed coins?.‘Your real mother is India’: How Jawaharlal Nehru inspired Parikshat Sahni to return home.YouTuber Savukku Shankar gets six months jail for saying judiciary is ‘riddled with corruption’.Roger Federer retires: Rafael Nadal – ‘My friend and rival, I wish this day would have never come’.A single mother (and a psychologist) gives advice on how to have awkward conversations with a child.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.
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