The full title of the thread is: Discovering the world legacy of shanties and forebitters by Jerzy "Shogun" Brzezinski.


This thread is about my discovery of an almost forgotten world of shanties and forebitters. In my opinion, an authentic shanty, sung in the same way as it was done on the decks of the merchant navy of the golden age of the sail, hardly exists anymore.

Authenticity has been completely forgotten. Slowly over the years, the authenticity has been replaced by beautiful performances and catchy arrangements. It happened as I suppose thanks to the desire to please as many people as possible. Unfortunately, thanks to this, the connection between the original genuine shanties and the modern successors are getting weaker if it still exists.

The goal of my passion is to try to recreate the forgotten songs of work in the way they were sung during the period when they performed their task, which was to consolidate efforts during work that was beyond human strength. Shanties were the factor that made the sailors believe that they could cope with the task. A strenuous task followed by another and another.

Of course, you can find various types of shanties, which are very authentic, for example, they are also modeled on or are helpful to me, I would like to thank all their creators and the performer for their help and inspiration.

The main goal is to record the shanties that have been written in the greatest works of world collectors such as Stan Hugill, Joanna C. Colcord, Cecil Sharp, Frederic Peace Sharp, William Doerflinger, and so on.
The first work where I'm going to record all the songs, without exception, is Stan Hugill's "Shanties From the Seven Seas".

I will try to record all the shanties without any arrangement, only maybe in the background you will hear the noise of mosaics or storms, however, each of the shanties will be sung with the thought of the work it was used for, I will try to explore each task as much as possible, of course as the imagination will allow. All forgotten things that were special to shanties, such as pace, effort in pulling, heaving, or spinning, will be reminded by me.

Unfortunately, I do not have a gang, so as long as I play the shanties myself, maybe one day someone will want to take part in my project, then the crew will respond by singing the chorus. The content of this thread will be shanties, a link to my performance, and a description of the song from the first to the last of each subsequent work taken as the subject of research.