Enjoy a fascinating evening with insights into sea shanites from two experts, concluding with an optional singing session where you can join in to learn a few sea shanties.
The Journey of the Sea Shanty: From Work Song to Cultural Icon
Dr Mollie Carlyle explores the shanty in its 19th-century maritime context, examining its role as a work song aboard merchant ships and highlighting its diverse global origins.
Mollie is a maritime musicologist specialising in the cultural history of sea shanties and maritime music. Her interdisciplinary research explores music’s connections to colonialism, slavery and heritage, combining archival and ethnographic methods. She publishes widely, teaches and engages public audiences through scholarship on seafaring cultures and musical traditions.
Alive as the sea, the folk process in action
Daniel Woodfield explores shanties in their contemporary context: as living songs that travel, mutate and take root in new communities.
Drawing on ideas of music as living heritage, this talk asks what it means for a repertoire with global portside origins to become a thriving and meaningful part of today’s UK folk scene. Using examples from festivals and sessions where shanties flourish, including the Falmouth International Sea Shanty Festival, Daniel will trace how these songs are being reimagined for the present, looking at adaptations that reshape not only lyrics, but also musical language and performance practice, from feminist interventions and queer shanty-making to the viral afterlives of 'ShantyTok'.
Daniel is a PhD candidate at SOAS University of London. He is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and active participant in the Cornish music and dance scene. His research focuses on Cornish music and dance as living heritage, and the ecosystems that sustain it.
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