this is a wonderful meme and I love it. and also, most of these are not actually shanties. read on if you care for a bit of pedantic nerdery in your thursday morning doomscroll https://twitter.com/somebypaths/status/1309000632507027460

say you've got a group of sailors hoisting the anchor, or trying to pump water out of the bilge, or raising the sails. this will be much easier if they do it in unison. the solution: shanties! these are work songs. do the task to a steady rhythm and boom – you're locked in.

and thus, there are different types of shanties for different tasks. Short drag shanties like "Haul Away Joe" were for tasks that required a few short bursts of energy, while "Santiana" would be for a longer, slower job like pumping water out or pushing the capstan.

here's how you can pretty reliably tell if a sea song is a shanty: most important, could you use it to keep the rhythm while working? after that, call and response is a big tell. also, the number of verses being fluid and lyrics being different from place to place.

shanties make grueling work mentally and physically easier, so any crew worth its salt would have a decent shantyman on board; this guy had to be able to both bellow out the verses and make up new ones quickly, because the songs needed to last as long as the task did.

you can try this too! next time you need to get your friends to help haul a couch up a few flights of stairs, try belting out "South Australia" and see what happens.

but then, when the task was done, the song was over – these shanties were only sung while working, not for amusement. for that, there were forecastle (foc'sle) songs, which the sailors would sing while on break.

these have more complex melodies, probably no improv, and aren't call and response. here's where you find Sloop John B, Greenland Whale Fisheries, Rolling Down to Old Maui, and many others

and then we have modern sea music inspired by the age of sail, like the many gems gifted us by the late great Stan Rogers (Barrett's Privateers, The Mary Ellen Carter, Northwest Passage)

anyway, somewhere along the line "any folk song that mentions the sea" got conflated with "shanty," and perhaps this represents an inevitable evolution of the english language – but i love sea music in all its guises and the distinction is important to me...

...as i do my darndest to respect the tradition while also helping it evolve into a more inclusive version of itself.

tl;dr all shanties are horny about boats if you look hard enough, thank you for coming to my ted talk