There’s No Such Thing as “Just a Song”
During the early, quiet, and lonely months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many strange things occurred, among them a renewed interest in a near-dead genre of music: sea shanties. It started with one viral video on TikTok and it morphed, as trends do, to include other types of ballads and chants, leaving historians scratching their heads.
“They’re not shanties!” explains maritime music expert Stephen Sanfilippo in exasperation. “Those songs aren’t even work songs”—the type of folk music to which shanties belong.
Sanfilippo discovered the genre in the mid-1970s when, fresh out of the Navy, he started a folk music club at the Long Island high school where he taught. He went looking for old songs from the area; one led to another, and he has dedicated the half-century since then to collecting, performing, analyzing, and teaching songs from the sea.
To him, the songs that briefly went mainstream are more than just fun ditties or old-fashioned novelties. They’re important historic artifacts that give us a glimpse into how people in the past lived, worked, and thought of themselves. “Sometimes my students will say, ‘It’s just a song,’” says Sanfilippo. “But there’s so such thing as ‘just a.’”
