 Welcome to the Endless Knot. So I've been sitting on an interesting linguistic fact about sea shanties for a few years, and now, suddenly, sea shanties are everywhere. There's been an explosion of interest in sea shanties, particularly one called Soon May the Wellerman Come, on TikTok. Actually, technically, Wellerman isn't exactly a sea shanty, as Adam Neely makes clear in a recent video. This fact is about sea shanties, and it's part of a larger story that I put out a video about a few months ago, the story of where the word and the instrument guitar came from, which ended with the particular importance of the guitar to rock and roll, and I have a follow-up video coming out later this year about the origin of rock and roll. And that's where sea shanties come in. The phrase rock and roll has been around much longer than rock and roll music itself. Rocking and rolling has been used since at least the 17th century to refer to the motion of a ship at sea, reflecting both the forward and backward rocking and side-to-side rolling motions. It was then picked up metaphorically with sexual connotations in, believe it or not, sea shanties. They were already using the phrase to refer to the ship's motion after all. So for instance, in the song Johnny Boker, is the line, Oh, do my Johnny Boker, Come rock and roll me over, do my Johnny Boker do, which, to my knowledge anyway, is the earliest connection between the phrase rock and roll and music. Sea shanties, by the way, are a type of work song, sung by the sailors as they do their work aboard ship. Work songs are a common phenomenon found in many cultures, times and contexts, as they help to regulate the rhythms of the labor and keep everyone in time. And the work songs sung by enslaved Africans on the plantations in the American South, along with being one of the possible influences on the development of sea shanties themselves, led to the blues and, eventually, to rock and roll. And this is why sea shanties, blues, and rock and roll, all often feature the call and response, which serve the functional role of regulating the rhythm by following the lead of the caller. The word shanty, by the way, first attested in 1856, long after the origin of the genre itself, though likely used for some time in sailor jargon before it was ever written down, probably comes from French chanté sing, the plural imperative of chanté to sing, from Latin cantare to sing, from the Proto-Indo-European root con to sing. Spellings with both the SH and CH are found, the CH reflecting the French spelling, and the SH reflecting the French pronunciation, though the SH may also reflect the influence of the other unrelated word shanty, meaning a crude hut, or perhaps even an attempt at making the word look less French. As for Johnny Boker, it exists in a number of different versions, including a fiddle folk song version that has nothing to do with the sea and has little in common with the sea shanty version. The sea shanty version is probably most popularly known from its use in the video game Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag. Originally, it seemed to have served the purpose of setting the time when pulling an anchor free from mud, which would make it a short drag shanty, appropriate for quick jobs that required a strong heave, as opposed to a howlered shanty for more prolonged work. Who Johnny Boker might be is unknown, but one suggestion is that the name is connected with an obscure 19th century British parlor song called Johnny Boker. So sea shanties and rock and roll share some characteristics because they share some history. And to highlight this, I now present to you my own version of the first rock and roll song, Johnny Boker.