Yellow Submarine (as sea chantey)

This is a demonstration of the fact that any popular song with a workable rhythm and structure might have been used by sailors as a chantey. Usually this phenomenon applied to work at the capstan, since that job did not require quite so specific a form as did other shipboard tasks. If it had a "a good chorus" and a regular beat, it might work.

In this way, many songs originating on the land and in popular culture, especially marches, were adopted and adapted as capstan chanteys. Some lived on and became known as chanteys. Others were probably sung incidentally, though we know them so well in other spheres that they have not been coded as "chanteys." This is the point the narrator was making about the two popular American Civil War marches, "John Brown's Body" and "Marching Through Georgia." They were most certainly used as capstan chanteys, but they don't appear in any chantey books because that would be sort of superfluous.

The narrator is Glenn Grasso (PhD), a historian and a former interpreter at Mystic Seaport. This clip was taken at Mystic's Sea Music Festival in June 2009. A group of teenagers from New Haven, CT, who perform in a sea song group called The ChanTeens, are volunteering to run the capstan. Grasso is demonstrating his point about the appropriation of popular songs by singing this Beatles classic.

(*This public performance is within fair use for posting, but I was unable to find a contact G. Grasso to run it by him. If someone knows his email, please let me know .)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• yellow
• submarine
• sea
• shanty
• chantey
• capstan
• mystic
• seaport
• demonstration
• beatles

[philipsmovies]

Interesting idea. I would like you to do a similar treatment to Anarchy In The Uk-Sex Pistols and Who Are You-The Who.

[hultonclint]

It would be fun; I'd like to sail in a traditional ship and try out various songs like that at the capstan. Mainly, the song has to have a good, long-ish chorus for everyone to join in with, and also the rhythm of it should set a good beat. A lot of rock songs are not as good because in them the beat is supplied by drums, against which the sung melody syncopates. Subtract the drums/instruments, and the sung melody is not clear with its rhythm. It would be fun to think about which ones would work

[ThisNameIsNotStupid]

Try doing anything by Dream Theater and I guarantee you that giant wheel will break into a billion tiny peaces of awesome.