Bill Shustik: Sea Shanties

Mon., July 14

The next speaker of the day Bill Schustik was quite a character. Having worked on board the 100+ ft. top sail schooner the Shenandoah for 35 years, the man was something like Herman Melville (who famously said the “whaling ship was my Harvard”). Instead of a mammoth book (Moby Dick), his travels have resulted in his abundant knowledge of sea shanties (or work songs of the sea). The Shenandoah is an old style sailboat without any type of motor at all and looks like what a slaveship of the 1700s would have looked like. He started his presentation with the song “Shenandoah”, I song I had not heard before attending this Institute and which sounded clunky and irregular to me at first. I now see the song as the graceful and moving sea song that it is. Several of the people in the institute, including myself, had that clunky and irregular song stuck in their head for the rest of the afternoon. He gave a wonderful description of the journey a sailboat would have taken departing Pittsburgh and winding down the Missouri all the way to New Orleans. The journey is no longer possible today because of the dams along some of these riverways.

He spoke in depth about the songs sung while pulling the anchor in, an arduous task requiring about nine men and at least twenty minutes under good conditions. The work songs sung during this process were important because they kept the men moving in the same tempo and, Shustik said, they increased productivity by (I think it was) about 30%! That is, sailors actually worked harder while singing the songs. For this reason, sailors would routinely get kicked by the foreman if they weren’t singing.

The song “Lowland” would be a good song to look at for classes during Sir Walter Raleigh, the cruel English captain. It is said that more sailors were lost to his cruelty than as a result of the war he fought.

Here is the list of the sea shanties he sang for us. As you can see, he sang a lot of songs for us.

“Johnny Come down to Hilo”
“Shenandoah”
“Santy Ana” (or “The Plains of Mexico”)
“Banks of Sacramento”
“Haul in the Bowline”
“What should we do with a drunken sailor”
“Donkey Riding”
“Down among the dead men”
“The Black Ball Line”
“Blow the man down”
“The Dreadnought”
“Blow ye Winds in the morning”
“Can’t you Dance the Polka?”
“The Keeper of the Eddystone Light”
“Lowlands Away”
“The Rio Grande”
“Haul Away Joe”“Paddy Doyle’s Boots”
“Paddy Lay Back”
“The Golden Vanity”
“One More Day”
“Rolling Home”
“Roll Alabama Home”
“The Pirate Song”“Hobo’s Lullaby”