 Hi everyone. Before I started this video, I just wanted to remind you all about Polyphonic Live, where you can find my stream highlights and see me chatting more casually about music stuff. So go check it out. And thanks for watching. I hope you like this video. I was supposed to be on hiatus right now, taking some time off from making polyphonic videos. But then I woke up one day to news of this. Tiktok is known for creating musical phenomena overnight, but I don't think anyone could have predicted that a 19th century New Zealand whaling song would become the internet's next phenomenon. In hindsight though, it's kind of shocking that the internet hadn't caught on to the beauty of sea shanties yet. They're endlessly catchy, singable by design, and honestly they're just a lot of fun. Upon seeing the news that sea shanties were a phenomenon, like any good Canadian, I had one thought. If you're not Canadian, you might not know what comes next. But if you are, you've probably already shouted, I wish I was in Sherbrook now. Back at the screen. Because that is of course the immortal opening call and response of Stan Rogers Barrett's Privateers, a song as Canadian as maple syrup. It's a masterpiece of folk storytelling, a quintessential drinking song, and a piece that's become a classic sea shanty despite the fact that it was written nearly two centuries after the events that it describes. Let's take a closer look. The year was 1973 and a young Stan Rogers was throwing back drinks and singing sea shanties with a folk group called the Friends of Fiddlers Green. Rogers would happily join them on the choruses, but he didn't know any songs that he could sing lead on. Feeling frustrated and left out, Rogers left the party early. According to the legend, when the singers gathered to nurse their hangovers at the breakfast table the next day, Stan Rogers came with a sheet of handwritten lyrics. Alastair Brown, a member of the Friends of Fiddlers Green, remembers Rogers announcing his presence by throwing the sheet onto the table and saying, suck that back you limey bastards. The lyrics were, of course, Barrett's privateers. This marked a shift in Rogers' career. He started out singing coffee houses, writing the kind of folk that had exploded out of New York's Greenwich Village scene, and while there's plenty to be said about coffee house folk, Barrett's privateers fits into a different kind of mold. It's the kind of timeless folk that you can sing with friends at kitchen parties and the kind of folk that preserves history in music. Barrett's privateers is set at a specific turning point in history. The year of 1778, in which the bulk of the story happens, was in the middle of the American Revolutionary War. Much has been sung about that war, but often it's singing of the generals and aristocrats. True to the folk tradition, Stan Rogers instead sings from the perspective of a working class sailor. The Revolutionary War reached out and impacted the lives of nearly everyone on the North American continent, particularly those in Nova Scotia. Early in the war, Nova Scotia was sympathetic to the Americans, and the colony even considered siding with the American Revolutionaries. However, Nova Scotia also contained many key ports and facilitated trade with the loyalists. As a result, it became a heavy target for privateers in the first few years of the war. Of course, Nova Scotia and England struck back with their own privateers, which is where Rogers' story comes in. In Rogers' narrative, a sailor named Elcid Barrett gets a letter of mark from the British King, allowing him to capture American merchant ships. Barrett recruits a crew for his ship with promises that make up the first half of Stan Rogers' chorus. But as the response continues, we learn that the promises fell flat. The song lives on irony, the comparison between Barrett's promise and the sad state of the singer. You listen to the story to learn the difference between the promise and the payoff. And the verses tell the story with incredible period accuracy. Rogers clearly knows his history, as he describes not only the journey but also the soaring condition of Elcid's sloop, the antelope. This comes through best in the fourth verse, where Rogers sings of the journey to Jamaica's Montego Bay, a journey that takes three times as long as it should, thanks to the antelope taking on water constantly. Of course, it's not all accurate. Stan Rogers uses a bit of artistic license to celebrate his own heritage. The singer's cries of, I wish I was in Sherbrooke now, are likely a reference to Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia, a town that wasn't founded until 1815. This anachronism is likely there because of Rogers' childhood summers spent in Nova Scotia, near Sherbrooke. So when Rogers sings of Sherbrooke, he's singing his own true sentiments, alonging for the familiarity of the summer home of his youth. The antelope is far from Sherbrooke when they spot their prey, a large, slow American ship. Often the act of capturing merchant ships was actually bloodless, privateers would simply fire warning shots and then take the unarmed merchants. However, the antelopes cracked cannons due little to scare the Yankee ship. Instead, the merchants returned fire with cannons of their own, and disabled the antelope in one clean shot. In the eighth verse we learn what happens to the song's two main characters. Elsid Barrett dies violently, and part of the rig falls on the protagonist, disabling him for life. This brings us to the final verse where our protagonist is brought home, likely after time as a prisoner of war. Barrett puts his return at Halifax six years after they sailed away. The Revolutionary War ended in 1783, meaning an 1884 return for an imprisoned sailor makes a lot of sense. Notably, Rogers also puts the character's age at 23 years, the same age he was when he wrote the song. With one last repetition of the chorus, the entirety of the story is made clear. Barrett's privateers is everything you want in a sea shanty. It's equal parts funny and tragic, describing the hard life of working-class sailors, but doing so with a unique kind of glib Nova Scotian irony. In writing the song, Stan Rogers found his voice. He would continue to write sailor songs and release them on his 1976 album, Fogarty's Cove. In the documentary One Warm Line, Rogers said that writing these songs changed his perspective. I thought I'd get out of it. I'd start it out as a contemporary songwriter, but I thought I couldn't leave it alone. Once you get hooked on a thing like this, get the sea in front of you all the time, you can't leave it alone. Over the rest of his short career, Stan Rogers became a kind of people's historian for Canada. He preserved the country not through images of maple leaves and patriotism, but through singing the complicated, heartbreaking, human stories of working-class people. Barrett's privateers is more than just a sailing song. It's a living document of Atlantic Canada. So now that you know, go off, throw back some drinks, sing a chorus of Barrett's privateers, and I don't know, maybe make a TikTok or something.