Good reference, Jon!

There is very little documentation of sea-going chanties, in what I'd call the familiar form, in publication before the late 1840s.


In my article published last month in American Music (ignore the weird publication date of "2023"), I attempt to take stock of these "1840s" (ship) chanties (pp370-371), namely: "A Hundred Years Ago," "Across the Western Ocean," and "Stormy." Well, and then there's "Sally Brown" in 1839.

To be clear, that is not to say the songs of this sort didn't exist earlier, just that to place more songs requires inference, deduction, supposition (eg "So-and-So said in the 1870s that he started his sea career in the 1840s and he learn this song at the beginning of his career").

In the article, this assessment obliquely supports my thesis that although the advent of the brake windlass (by the mid-'40s, in most cases) was not the condition that allowed chanty singing in ships, it may have been what helped the genre begin to really flourish in that context.

Accessing the article might require institutional access etc. If anyone without access wants it, they can reach out to me and I can try to provide a copy.