If you’d like to push this song further then I’d recommend checking out my Patreon channel. Here are the lyrics alongside the chords so you can perform it and become a TikTok sensation.įor the verses you’ll be repeating the chords as follows…Īm x 4 | Dm x 2 | Am x 2 | Am x 4 | E x 2 | Am x 2į x 2 | C x 2 | Dm x 2 | Am x 2 | F x 2 | C x 2 | E x 2 | Am x 2 Try and emphasise the first and third beats to really drive it. Here’s that strumming pattern as a diagram… We’re going to go with a steady D DUD DU repeated across the entire song, this will give us the driving beat that keeps the song moving forwards. The Strumming PatternĪs sea shanties were primarily sung on ships and boats, they’re largely unaccompanied by any instruments and performed acapella which means anything we play is going to be quite simple. If you need a little help with the E chord, check out my post on playing the E chord. It is now receiving 30,000 streams a day on Spotify.For this ukulele version of The Wellerman we’ll be using 5 chords: Am, Dm, C, F and the dreaded E. The Wellington Sea Shanty Society recorded Soon May The Wellerman Come on their 2013 album, Now That’s What I Call Sea Shanties Vol 1, and again in 2018. And no, 'tonguing' doesn't mean what you think it means. The rising tide of ShantyTok has reached New Zealand shores, too. The 'Wellerman' sea shanty popular on TikTok goes back to 19th century whaling in New Zealand. That recording, by Bristol group The Longest Johns, is showing 8.5m recent plays. To sunny South I next might go, I've even gone across the sea To tarry there a week or. “I was singing it with others in folk clubs 40 years ago,” says Archer.Īnd now Wellerman is being circulated further by Spotify by way of its new “sea shanty season” playlist, celebrating “centuries-old songs gone viral”. No songs are writ of what I do, And yet romance is in my frame. His Google “guesswork” suggests Wellerman’s composer was a teenage sailor or shore whaler around New Zealand in the late 1830s, who penned the ditty on settling in Australia then passed it down within his family around the turn of the century.įrom there, the shanty is believed to have spread around the world by its inclusion in Colquhoun’s book Songs of a Young Country, published in England in 1972. Researching that link led Archer to shanties published in The Bulletin paper in Sydney in 1904. Neil Colquhoun – a New Zealand folk music pioneer, who died in 2014 – first documented Wellerman in 1966, from a man then in his 80s who said he had been taught it by his uncle. Its embrace by TikTok is an unexpected 21st-century twist in a folkloric tradition that can be traced through New Zealand’s past. Mentally i'm here /IlinXkqcTH- ˗ˏˋ Hayley DeRoche ˎˊ˗ January 13, 2021 “My guess is that the Covid lockdowns have put millions of young into a similar situation that young whalers were in 200 years ago: confined for the foreseeable future, often far from home, running out of necessities, always in risk of sudden death, and spending long hours with no communal activities to cheer them up.” The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea She had not been two weeks from shore. With the struggle ongoing at the shanty’s end, “the Wellerman makes his regular call, to encourage the Captain, crew and all”.Īrcher suggests that it is the shanty’s “cheerful energy and hopeful outlook” – in contrast to other more “dreary” whaling songs – that has led to Wellerman’s rediscovery on social media. Wellerman - lyrics There once was a ship that put to sea. As sailors sing to encourage each other and keep in time as they work, we can use the Wellerman sea shanty, relyriced as a parody song to spur each other on. Wellerman’s six verses tell the epic tale of a ship, the Billy of Tea, and its crew’s battle – “for 40 days, or even more” – to land a defiant whale. As Ronald Jones writes in Te Ara national encyclopaedia, that period of seafaring industry “slipped unobtrusively out of the pages of New Zealand history” – preserved only through song.
(Their ship, the Lucy Ann, also went on to be crewed by one Herman Melville.)īut by 1841 the Wellers’ business had collapsed. The brothers Joseph Brooks, George and Edward Weller emigrated from Folkestone, Kent, to Sydney in 1823 and within 10 years had established themselves as the region’s preeminent merchant traders.Īt the time, whaling was a prime export industry of New South Wales while, in New Zealand, the Wellers’ whaling station base at Ōtākou on the Otago Peninsula was the first enduring European settlement of what is now Dunedin city. ShantyTok is taking the wellerman to increasingly more amazing levels! /9Bouf1IEN3- Sly lil´ Vix ~? Foxxie January 12, 2021