"There is strong evidence to suggest that shanty singing evolved from American river songs and slave songs. Many of the shanties have American themes."

The book 'Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands', by Lydia Parrish, identifies various sea shanties being sung by the ex-slave communities she researched and collected from (circa 1912, but many of the older singers she collected from remembered the songs from 50 years before). A number of those songs are ones we'd recognise in England, such as Sandy Anna and Shilo Brown. There was so much cultural interchange over these songs that none of them can be absolutely identified as "belonging" to a particular culture.