Right. If you only ever learn ONE song to break out at a party, a session, a wedding, a bus full of strangers, a funeral if you're brave — make it this one. The Drunken Sailor is the most foolproof crowd song on earth and I will die on that hill.
Here's why. You don't need to know the tune. You barely need to know the words. One person sings the question, everybody else has nothing to do but shout the answer and "early in the morning" back, and within about forty seconds people who swore blind they "can't sing" are bellowing about putting a man in a longboat till he's sober. It just WORKS. I've watched it happen a hundred times.
And the bit I love most, the bit that's basically why it's on this site at all — it's near enough cumulative in spirit. Not strictly. It's not a proper add-on-each-verse song like the Rattlin' Bog is. But it's got that same engine: one question, answered over and over, and every answer is just a bit more daft and a bit more cruel than the last. It never has to end. You can keep inventing punishments for the poor sailor until the pub closes. That endlessness is exactly what makes a singalong immortal.
A Bit of History
Honest hat on, because I won't sell you fake certainty.
This is a SHANTY — a working song. Specifically what the sailors called a "stamp-and-go" or walkaway shanty, the kind you'd sing while a whole gang of men hauled on a rope together and walked it down the deck. The rhythm isn't decoration. It's the job. That insistent, marching pulse is the sound of men keeping in step so the work got done. Once you know that, you can't un-hear it.
When exactly it was born — nobody can tell you, and anybody who gives you a precise year is guessing. The earliest solid trace we have is from the eighteen-twenties, when it gets a mention in a description of a sea voyage, which tells us it was already being sung by working sailors by then. After that it turns up in the printed shanty collections that folk did much later in the eighteen-hundreds, once people started bothering to write these things down. But a song like this almost certainly lived and changed for a good while in sailors' mouths before any of that. Oral songs are old before they're ever written. The ink is the END of the story, not the start.
The tune itself is a borrow — it leans on an old marching air, the sort of thing that floated around Irish and British folk tradition long before any sailor stamped a deck to it. That's how these things go. Nothing comes from nowhere.
And the words drift, which is the joy of it. There's no "correct" set. Different ships, different ports, different decades all kept their own punishments for the drunken sailor, some of them gentle and some of them you would not sing in front of your granny. The ones below are the common, clean, traditional public-domain verses — the ones everyone half-knows.
Lyrics
What shall we do with a drunken sailor, What shall we do with a drunken sailor, What shall we do with a drunken sailor, Early in the morning?
Way hay and up she rises, Way hay and up she rises, Way hay and up she rises, Early in the morning.
Put him in the longboat till he's sober, Put him in the longboat till he's sober, Put him in the longboat till he's sober, Early in the morning.
Pull out the plug and wet him all over, Pull out the plug and wet him all over, Pull out the plug and wet him all over, Early in the morning.
Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him, Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him, Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him, Early in the morning.
Hoist him aboard with a running bowline, Hoist him aboard with a running bowline, Hoist him aboard with a running bowline, Early in the morning.
That's what we do with a drunken sailor, That's what we do with a drunken sailor, That's what we do with a drunken sailor, Early in the morning.
How to Sing It
Fast. Steady. Like a drum, not like a ballad. The whole thing lives or dies on that stamping pulse, so set the tempo with your foot before you open your mouth and DON'T let it sag.
The teaching trick is the simplest in the world: you sing the question and "early in the morning", the crowd only ever has to give you "way hay and up she rises" and the answers back. So before you start, just tell them — "all you need to do is shout WAY HAY AND UP SHE RISES, that's it." That's the whole lesson. Then go. They'll have it on the first chorus.
Now the real fun. When you run out of the traditional verses, KEEP GOING. Make them up. Point at someone in the room and invent a punishment with their name in it. "Shave his belly with a rusty razor," "stick him in a bag and beat him senseless," whatever the night calls for — the crowd will roar louder for the ones you clearly invented on the spot. This is the near-cumulative magic I keep banging on about: it's a frame you can fill forever, exactly like the Bog, only the Bog adds and this one escalates.
It's a brilliant one to plant early in a night to get a quiet crowd warmed and shouting, then later you bring the room down soft with something like The Parting Glass when everyone's spent. For the full words and the singing notes to the song this whole shrine is built around, the lyrics page is where you start.
Teach it to children, teach it to your nan, teach it to the lad at the back who never sings. It works on everyone. Way hay and up she rises, lads.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat does a thing during this one where he marches across the windowsill exactly on the beat, every single time, and I have decided not to think too hard about how a cat keeps time better than half the sessions I've been in.