The background music is Rio Grande
Sequenced by Lesley Nelson
Welcome to The Songs of the Sea. This is part of Lesley Nelson's Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales & America website. This page contains only a small portion of the tunes from that site. I put these on a separate page for visitors to have easier access to them, to organize them better and because of my interest in the sea (my father and grandfather were U.S. Naval Captains).
If you wish to use any of these tunes in an archive or on a webpage READ THIS.
While sea shanties originated on ships of many different countries, they spread throughout the seas. Shanties were used for the hard work aboard ships and sentiments in them were universal. They were not originally in the musical form we find them today, but chanted - with the chanter calling out words and the men calling out the chorus in rhythm to their work. For information about sea shanties click
here.