Sea shanties set sail as La Nef's Seán Dagher joins Chor Leoni
The vocalist and cittern player applies early-music scholarship to ancient songs of the sailor’s life
Seán Dagher. Photo by David Cooper
Chor Leoni, Seán Dagher, and La Nef present The Return Voyage at St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church on Friday and Saturday, February 16 and 17
WITH THEIR STRONG RHYTHMIC patterns, rousing choruses, and lusty undertones, sea shanties are songs with a purpose, having been built to synchronize the efforts of sailors when attempting an arduous task. Raising an anchor, hoisting a canvas mainsail, or pulling at the sweeps: in the days before steam, large sailing vessels required muscle and sinew in addition to a stiff breeze, and group singing helped ease the pain of effort.
Nowadays even amateur boaters have access to electric winches and other labour-saving devices, but those old sea shanties have found new homes, as La Nef’s singer and cittern player Seán Dagher discovered early on in his professional career.
“I played for many years in Irish pubs in Montreal and Ottawa, and there are a few songs in that sort of pub repertoire that require the audience to sort of holler back something. Those are always the biggest hits, and you sort of save those for key moments,” he explains in a telephone interview from his Montreal home. “I always had a couple of shanties in my repertoire, but once I realized that there’s this whole repertoire of songs that are designed specifically around the idea of getting the audience or the crew to sing back responses to you, there were 150 more guaranteed hits. So I decided I’d better go learn some of them.”
Classics such as “Rolling Down to Old Maui”, “Leave Her Johnny”, and “The Press Gang” quickly made their way into Dagher’s pub sets, but in recent years he’s adopted a somewhat different tack. Having already given the Elizabethan melodies of Henry Purcell and John Dowland an Irish-pub makeover, he’s now applying early-music scholarship to ancient songs of the sailor’s life, and while he agrees that court music and sea shanties represent very different strata of human existence, they have more in common than might initially appear.
“Sea shanties really came to prominence in the 19th century,” he notes, “but certain ones have existed since the 16th century, and have been sung continuously since then. So in that sense, sea shanties are early music. They’re from the same era, but they existed in separate spheres for those centuries, and now is my chance to sort of bring these two elements together.”
Dagher’s project involves a number of very different facets. There’s his work with La Nef, which is both a band and an arts organization that supports a variety of projects, ranging from early music to modern intercultural explorations. There’s his popular Shanty of the Week video series, which can be viewed online. There’s an ongoing collaboration with Vancouver’s own men’s choir, Chor Leoni, which has already resulted in a well-received CD, Shanties! Live. (Dagher and La Nef will rejoin Chor Leoni for The Return Voyage at St.Andrew’s Wesley United Church on Friday and Saturday, February 16 and 17.) And, perhaps most notably, there are his contributions to the Assassin’s Creed video game, which have brought sea shanties to a brand new and generally much younger audience world-wide.
“That’s when I got to know most of the repertoire that we do,” Dagher says, adding that while he’s no gamer, he appreciates the work—and the attention to detail that the Ubisoft production company brought to the project.
Photo by Danylo Bobyk
“I’ve never played any of the games that I’ve worked on,” he admits. “But Ubisoft was really concerned with historical accuracy when we sang those songs—and with everything in the game, actually—so we had to do an awful lot of research to ensure that the place names that we used were the place names of the time, and that the sings could have existed at the time the game took place. So it was an academic endeavour as well as a video-game one. And then the other thing that gave me courage—and hope for humanity—is that young people who are gamers, they latched on to this style of music by the thousands. It was nothing like they’d ever heard before, and they had no other reason to get into it, but people from all over the world reached out to say that they liked the folk music and the shanties that we put into the game. For me, that was heartening.”
Sea shanties have enjoyed mass popularity in the past. There was a vogue for them in the 1950s, at the very start of the folk revival that also also popularized work songs and dust-bowl ballads; Stan Rogers and Gordon Lightfoot drew on them when they were defining Canadian song in the 1960s and ‘70s; early in this millennium, the late producer Hal Willner built two brilliant volumes of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys on the back of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. But it’s especially appropriate that they’re coming back into vogue right now, at a time when work is increasingly divorced from physical labour, and when a wave of loneliness has accompanied a switch from group activities to more solitary pursuits.
Not only does singing together offer a range of well-documented mental and physical health benefits, it’s a way of sharing a spirit of community that can otherwise be hard to find.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a big sea-shanty vogue happened during a time of mass lockdowns,” says Dagher, who adds that he hopes the audience will join in when he and La Nef take the stage with Chor Leoni. “These songs were designed to get everyone pulling at the same time, to get the maximum effort out of the pull. You can feel that in the songs; people are exerting force through singing. It’s a workout, but it’s also like any other choir singing; people who sing in choirs often talk about the value of singing together, and we have that in our world as well.”
Related Articles
