Right, so this one has been simmering for a while.
Ever since the whole TikTok shanty wave a few years back — yer man with the booming voice doing the Wellerman, the whole internet stomping a beat on a kitchen table — I have had people email me, message me, corner me at sessions, asking the same thing. "Seamus, is the Rattlin' Bog a sea shanty?" And the answer is no. God, no. But I understand WHY people ask, and the honest truth is the line is blurrier than the purists want you to believe.
Let me try and sort it out, because nobody ever actually explains the difference. They just gatekeep it and move on.
A sea shanty — a real one, a proper one — is a WORK song. That is the whole thing. That is the heart of it. It existed to get a job done on a sailing ship. Hauling a rope, turning the capstan, pumping out the bilge. The rhythm of the song WAS the rhythm of the work. The shantyman would sing the verse — he was a paid position on some ships, sort of, the fella with the strong voice and the gas memory — and the crew would come in on the chorus, and on that chorus they'd all HEAVE together. The music was a tool. It synced the muscle. No rhythm, no pull, and the rope doesn't move.
That's why shanties have that very particular call-and-response shape, with the heavy stress landing exactly where the strain lands. "What shall we DO with the drunken SAIL-or" — feel where the weight is? That's a foot bracing. That's a rope coming in. I did a whole post on the history of Drunken Sailor and the thing that still gets me is that it's a stamp-and-go shanty, meant for a crew literally walking along the deck dragging a line. The song is doing physical labour. It's not entertainment. It only became entertainment later, when nobody needed to haul anything and we kept singing it anyway because it's deadly.
A pub song is the opposite in one crucial way. The job of a pub song is to be sung. That's IT. There is no rope. The only thing being hauled is a pint to your mouth.
So here's my actual criteria, after years of thinking about this more than any grown man should.
A sea shanty: it was made to do work at sea, it has that hard call-and-response heave, and the words are usually about ships, the sea, ports, leaving, sailors, captains, voyages. A pub/session song: it was made to be sung for the love of singing, in a room, with drink, and it can be about absolutely anything — love, death, a stolen horse, a fella who drank too much cider and saw the devil.
Now. Here is where it gets messy, and where the purists go quiet.
Loads of songs you'll hear called "shanties" were never shanties. They were FORECASTLE songs — "fo'c'sle" songs, the sailors said — sung off-duty, in the crew's quarters, for fun. Not for work. Same lads, same ship, but one was labour and one was the craic after the labour. The Mermaid is a perfect example. People file it under sea shanty because it's got a ship and a storm and a watery doom in it, and I wrote up the whole strange tale of The Mermaid precisely because it's such a beautiful drowning song — but it's a forecastle song, a ballad, an entertainment. It has no work rhythm. You can't haul a rope to it. You'd lose your fingers trying.
So a lot of the "is this a shanty" argument is really people using "shanty" to mean "any old salty seafaring song," which, fine, language drifts, I'm not the salt police. But if you want the real answer at a session and you don't want some bearded man in an Aran jumper sighing at you — work song at sea, with the heave, about the sea. That's a shanty. Everything else is a song that happens to be wet.
And where does the Rattlin' Bog sit in all this? Nowhere near the water, lads. It's a cumulative song. Its whole architecture is about building a list and never forgetting your place, the tree in the bog, the branch on the tree, the twig, the nest, the bird, the feather, the FLEA (the flea verse is the climax, I will not be taking questions). That's a memory game with a melody. A shanty needs the words to stay simple so the crew can keep heaving without thinking. The Bog needs the words to keep PILING UP. They're opposite engines. If you tried to haul a mainsail to the Rattlin' Bog you'd be there till the heat death of the universe and the rope still wouldn't move. Though I'd pay good money to watch someone try.
The blur is real, though, I'll grant the TikTok crowd that much. A shanty in 2026 IS a pub song, functionally, because nobody's sailing a clipper through your local. The work is gone. What's left is the singing-together, the one-voice-then-all-voices, the stamp of feet, the way the whole room locks in on a chorus. And THAT — that communal lock-in — is the same magic whether it's a capstan or a snug bar in Ennis. Maybe that's why people muddle them. They feel the same in the chest.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole properly, half the songs people argue about live in the songbook, and you can decide for yourself which ones could haul a rope and which ones just want a pint. It's a better way to spend an evening than arguing online.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat sat on my keyboard during the Drunken Sailor paragraph and added about forty of the letter J. I've taken them out but it felt rude not to mention his contribution. He's a sea cat at heart, I think. Hates baths, loves the smell of the harbour.