Jphn-

Good points. The earliest work songs called "chanties" do appear to be the stevedore songs from the Gulf Coast. And once they went to sea and were adapted for the work there, sailors probably still referred to them as "chanties" but they certainly pronounced the word as "shanties" at sea or on shore, as "ch" would have been pronounced in Gulf Coast creole.

C. Fox Smith in the introduction of A Book of Shanties (1927) derided the practice of calling the nautical work songs "sea shanties" as superfluous because she was not aware of any "land shanties." But maybe if she had given it some more thought, and had access to the Low, Nordhoff and Whidden books, she would have come to a different conclusion.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble