Here is a thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to properly understand: "Drunken Sailor" was never meant to be sung in a pub. Not originally. It is a work song. A real one, with a real job to do, and the job had nothing to do with anyone being drunk.
Let me back up.
A shanty (or chanty, if you fancy the older spelling, and some of the old lads do) is a song sailors sang to coordinate hard labour on a sailing ship. Hauling ropes, turning the capstan, pumping out the bilge — all of it brutal, repetitive, and far easier if forty men pull on the exact same beat. The shantyman sang a line. The crew answered. And on the answer, everyone HEAVED. That's the whole engineering of it. The song is basically a machine for getting tired men to pull together.
"Drunken Sailor" is what they call a stamp-and-go shanty, or a runaway. Instead of a slow heave-pause-heave, the crew kept moving, marching the rope along the deck in a steady tramp. Which is why it gallops the way it does. That relentless one-two, one-two — that's not a stylistic choice, lads, that's the rhythm of feet on a deck.
And the words don't really matter, which is the gas part. The "question" — what shall we do with the drunken sailor — is a setup. The answer verses are just whatever keeps the beat going. Put him in the longboat till he's sober. Stick him in a scupper with a hosepipe on him. Shave his belly with a rusty razor (I always loved that one, it's so specifically cruel). They're not a plot. They're fuel. You sing them till the rope's where it needs to be and then you stop.
The earliest properly documented trace of it comes from the 1820s or thereabouts — there's an account from a fella on a ship around then describing exactly this kind of song. And the tune itself is older than the words, because the melody is basically the same skeleton as an Irish tune, "Óró Sé do Bheatha 'Bhaile." Now. I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of fact the internet loves to overstate. I'm NOT telling you a sailor sat down and copied an Irish song. Folk tunes drift. They get borrowed, half-remembered, reshaped. The melodies are close cousins. That's about as far as anyone honest can take it, and anyone telling you more than that is selling something.
So how did a brutal deck-hauling song end up being sung by eight-year-olds and by my uncle Donie at closing time?
Steam happened, mostly. Once ships didn't need forty men hauling rope by hand, the shanties had no job. The machine was retired. And a song with no work to do either dies or it goes looking for a new home — and "Drunken Sailor" had everything a singalong needs. A tune you catch on the first hearing. A question-and-answer shape that practically begs a crowd to shout back. And no fixed length, so you can keep it going as long as the craic holds. It walked off the ship and into the schoolroom, the scout campfire, the rugby clubhouse, the pub.
The made-up verses are the whole point. This is the bit I love most, and it's the bit that ties it to everything I bang on about on this site. "Drunken Sailor" is a song that wants you to invent. The "official" verses are a handful. After that, you're on your own, and every crowd makes up filthier and more local ones. I've heard a Clare version involving a county councillor that I will not be transcribing here. The song hands you a frame and dares you to fill it.
Which — and you knew I'd get here — is the same instinct that makes the Rattlin' Bog work. Different machine entirely, mind. The Bog is cumulative; it builds up and you have to remember the whole chain back to the bog itself. "Drunken Sailor" doesn't build, it just repeats and mutates. But both songs do the one essential thing a great singalong does: they make a room of strangers feel like a crew. You're all answering the same line. You're all stamping the same beat. For three minutes nobody is alone.
If you want the full traditional words and a proper bit on how to actually sing it without going off the rails, I've put it all in the songbook — here's Drunken Sailor. And if you're building a night's worth of these, it lives happily alongside the rest of the best pub singalong songs; it's one of the few that needs no instruments and no rehearsal at all. Just a strong voice to start it and a crowd willing to answer.
One last thing. Sing it FAST. People slow it down and it dies. It was built by men who needed to move a rope before the tide turned. Honour that. Tramp it along.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat is entirely unmoved by sea shanties, which I tested at some length on Tuesday. She did however perk up sharply at "shave his belly with a rusty razor," which I have decided not to think too hard about.