"Haul Away Joe" is a sea shanty — a work song, sung by sailors to time the heavy pulling jobs aboard a sailing ship. Shanties were a mixed tradition: Irish, English, and Caribbean singing all fed into them on the Liverpool and Atlantic packet ships where these songs lived. Irishmen crewed those ships, Irish emigrants crossed on them out of Liverpool, and this is the music both groups worked and travelled to.

The song is built around one instruction repeated until the job is done: haul away. Everything else — the girls, the king of France, the shantyman's whole stock of verses — hangs off that chorus.

What Kind of Shanty Is Haul Away Joe? Collectors Disagree

While not everyone agrees, most believe Haul Away Joe was used as a foresheet shanty - a song for a short, heavy pull. Captain W.B. Whall, in 1913, describes it as a song for “sweating up,” hauling a rope taut. Shanties were working tools, not concert pieces, and a good song got used wherever the rhythm fit. Its neighbours in our set show the range: Drunken Sailor is the famous one, and Leave Her Johnny is the farewell sung when the voyage ended and the crew was paid off.

How the Song Worked: One Pull on “Joe”

This kind of shanty was used not to help the crew pull steadily but to pull all together on the signal word. In Haul Away Joe the signal word is “Joe.” It was often grunted more than sung. Between pulls, the shantyman sang the verses, and he kept inventing new ones until the first mate was satisfied the job was done. If twenty verses was how long the work took, twenty verses he sung. Luckily for you, we do three verses to finish our work.

You can hear that grunt land in our Short of the song. The full performance at the top of this post lets you hear the verses stack up the way they were meant to — one more reason the verse-by-verse breakdown below works.

Mouldy Lips, Dating, and King Louis

The verses jump the way a shantyman's mind jumps. In the O'McPub Band version we start with a warning from mommy dearest - get to kissing some girls or your lips will be mouldy. I'm sure this plea worked with all the ladies at shore.

For the second verse, the female examples are traditionally from Ireland and Bristol. Being a good Irish-American duo we stick with what we know and have the second girl be American — same joke, new port. Shanties collected verses the way ships collected crews, and verses naming the girls of particular ports were swapped in and out constantly.

Jolly Rovin' Tar is the shore-side cousin of this song — a sailor song, but not a work shanty — and Leaving of Liverpool is the emigrant's farewell from the same port these ships sailed from. Where do all these sailors end up? Fiddler's Green is their paradise.

The last verse we sing is about Louis, King of France. This verse uses the word “constitution” as a history lesson and double meaning. Louis had tried to pass a constitution to stave off a revolution, but his plan was spoiled when he lost his head to the guillotine. Not sure if shantymen ever used this verse for real but us history buffs find it amusing and so it stays in our version.

For the primary sources: Mainly Norfolk's page on the song (Roud 809) collects recordings and Hugill's notes in one place, and a shanty collection quoting Hugill, Terry, and Whall directly lets you read the collectors' own words. The National Museum of Ireland's Irish Emigration to America — The Journey puts Irish passengers on the same ships, out of the same ports, where this singing was the soundtrack of the work.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"What shall we do with a drunken sailor?" is the most famous question in sea music, and nobody has ever answered it sensibly. "Drunken Sailor" is a work song — a shanty — sung to time hard labour aboard ship, and it has been sung that way since at least the 1830s.

It is not an Irish song, and this post won't pretend otherwise. But the tune underneath it leads a double life: the same tune family turns up in Ireland as Óró sé do bheatha abhaile, a song the Irish Volunteers marched to during the Easter Rising. A shanty for hauling ropes and a rebel marching song, built on the same bones — that is a real Irish-music story, and it is why this song sits comfortably in our set.

A Work Song First: Hauling Ropes on an 1839 Whaling Ship

The earliest clear sighting of the shanty in print comes from an account of an 1839 whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut, sung by a long line of men hauling together. It is No. 322 in the Roud Folk Song Index, and it was sung aboard ship from at least the 1830s onward.

It belongs to a particular class of shanty: a "stamp-and-go" or walkaway shanty, sung at a marching pace while the crew tacked the ship or hauled on a line as they walked. That job explains the song's shape. The chorus — "Way, hey, and up she rises" — never stops moving, because the men singing it never stopped moving. The verses had to be endless, because the work was.

Shanties were tools before they were entertainment. The song kept a crew pulling together at the same moment, which on a sailing ship was the difference between work done and men hurt. Our post on Haul Away Joe covers the same floating workplace from another watch, and Leave Her Johnny is the shanty sung at the end of a voyage, when the ship was finally paid off.

The Irish Tune Underneath: Óró Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile

The melody of "Drunken Sailor" closely resembles the Irish air Óró sé do bheatha abhaile — "Óró, you are welcome home." The honest wording is that the two belong to the same tune family: reference works describe a close resemblance rather than a proven borrowing, and nobody can show the exact moment one became the other. Sailors and soldiers carried tunes everywhere in those centuries, and tunes changed flags the way the men carrying them did.

The Irish song has its own long history. Its older Jacobite-era versions welcomed Bonnie Prince Charlie home; the lyric tradition also carries Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen of Connacht. In the early 1900s, Pádraig Pearse wrote new verses for it, and the Irish Volunteers sang it during the Easter Rising and used it as a fast march in the War of Independence.

So the same tune family did duty in both worlds at once: sailors of every nation hauling ropes to it at sea, and Irish Volunteers marching to it on land. Irishmen crewed ships out of every Atlantic port, and tunes moved between the forecastle and the rebel column because the same men, in different years, stood in both.

Fiddler's Green is the third corner of our sea songs: the heaven sailors imagined for themselves. The drunken sailor's morning, by contrast, is very much earthly, and the song is about to deal with him.

Why Every Verse Asks the Same Question — and Answers It Worse Each Time

The verses are a list of punishments, and the list is the joke. Put him in a longboat till he's sober. Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him. Shave his belly with a rusty razor. Each verse answers the question worse than the verse before.

That structure is practical as well as funny. A shanty had to last as long as the job lasted, so it was built to be extended by anyone in the crew — you only needed one new cruelty per verse, and the chorus carried you while you thought of it. It is the same building method as the pub songs in our set: a chorus a whole room can hold, and verses anyone can add to.

And the question was never really a question. Every sailor singing it knew the drunken sailor would be back on duty soon enough. The song laughs at him because the whole crew had been him.

Want to dig deeper? Wikipedia's Drunken Sailor article covers the 1839 sighting and the shanty's working life, and its article on Óró sé do bheatha abhaile traces the tune's other career — Jacobite welcome, Grace O'Malley, Pearse's verses and the Volunteers.

— hear us play it live (video above).

On November 10, 1975, the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a storm on Lake Superior with all 29 of her crew. No one survived, and to this day nobody knows for certain what sank her. Outside the Great Lakes, most of the world knows her name for one reason: Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about her within the year.

An honest word about why this song is on an Irish band's blog: the connection is the tradition, not the wreck. Lightfoot was Canadian and the crew were Great Lakes men. What the song shares with the Irish music on this blog is its job — a long narrative ballad that names working men and refuses to let them be forgotten. That is the same work done by Fiddler's Green and Leave Her Johnny, and Irish-American audiences in Great Lakes and pub country have taken those 29 names personally for fifty years.

November 10, 1975: What Happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald

The Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Lakes when she was launched, loaded with iron ore and working the run across Superior into the teeth of a November storm — the season the song calls the gales of November. The lyrics follow the final hours closely: the cargo, the relative safety of the Canadian shore route, the messages passing between ships as the weather closed in. Then, on the evening of November 10, she was gone — lost with all hands, in a sinking that has been investigated, argued over, and never fully explained.

Without the song, the wreck would likely have remained what it first was: a regional tragedy, enormous to the families and the Lakes ports, and unknown almost everywhere else. Lightfoot released the song in August 1976, less than a year after the sinking, and it carried the crew's story around the world.

How Lightfoot Wrote It (Newsweek, a Sea-Shanty Tune, and a Changed Line)

Lightfoot built the song from a magazine article. The Newsweek piece was headlined "The Cruelest Month," and it opened with the Chippewa legend of Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water — which is where the song's first verse comes from. The long, rolling tune underneath it is shaped like a sea shanty, built to carry a story verse after verse.

He also fact-checked himself, which fits how this blog tries to tell these stories. Early versions of the song suggested a main hatchway had caved in. Later reporting found no proof of that, and Lightfoot changed the line in live performance rather than lay blame where it did not belong. The songwriter corrected his own song when the evidence moved.

Remembering the Crew

In Detroit, when the news came in, the bell of the Mariners' Church was rung 29 times by the Reverend Richard Ingalls — once for each man. The song ends at that bell, and the bell is still the centre of how the crew is remembered. Since Lightfoot's death in 2023, the church has rung a 30th toll: for Lightfoot himself, and for all sailors lost on the Lakes.

The ship's own bell — 200 pounds of bronze — was recovered from the wreck on July 4, 1995, and is on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, placed there as a memorial to the crew at the families' request. The museum holds a memorial ceremony every November 10.

That work of naming and remembering is why this post sits comfortably next to Green Fields of France: one ballad names a single soldier in a war grave, the other names a crew of 29, and both exist so the dead are not just a number.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum's Edmund Fitzgerald page covers the bell, the annual ceremony, and the expeditions to the wreck, and Smithsonian Magazine's 50th-anniversary account tells the full story of the final voyage and the mystery after it.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Fisherman's Blues" is the title track of the Waterboys' 1988 album, and it marks one of the great changes of direction in modern folk-rock: a Scottish band that went to Ireland, fell in with Irish musicians, and came out the other side playing like a session band. Mike Scott, the band's frontman, has summed the story up himself: "Some cynics claim that Scotsman Mike Scott gave Irish music back to the Irish… it was the Irish tradition that influenced him."

That is the Irish story in this song. Ireland was not the Waterboys' home, but it was the place the music was — and Scott went to find it, the same pull that keeps traditional sessions alive wherever Irish music is played.

How the Waterboys Went Irish: Dublin, Wickham, and Spiddal House

The turn began with a fiddle player. Steve Wickham joined the Waterboys in 1985 and brought Scott into Dublin music circles. Scott moved to Ireland in 1986, and the recording that followed was not a single set of sessions but a two-year trawl: sessions at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin from January to March 1986 and again from March to August 1987, a December 1986 session in San Francisco, and finally the Spiddal House sessions in 1988, in the Galway village of Spiddal, where Scott was living. The Spiddal sessions produced the whole second side of the album.

Scott's own count of it is the best summary: "We started recording our fourth album in early '86 and completed it 100 songs and 2 years later." One hundred songs went into the making of Fisherman's Blues, and the album that came out in October 1988 wore its making openly — Irish traditional musicians in the room, tunes between the songs, and a band playing like a session that happened to be recorded.

The title song led the change rather than following it: the Waterboys performed "Fisherman's Blues" on the television show The Tube in 1986, two years before the album, as the first public showing of the new direction. And the folk turn was no retreat from the audience — Fisherman's Blues became the Waterboys' best-selling album, reaching No. 13 in the UK.

What "Fisherman's Blues" Is About: Out of Dry Land

The song itself is plain in its longing. The singer wants out — out of dry land and, as the opening puts it, its bitter memories; out of the city and the working life he has, and into a fisherman's life on the water. There is a love in it too — he wants the woman with him, working and travelling beside him, "travelling on" together. But the engine of the song is the trade itself: exchange the shore for the sea, and a cramped life for an open one.

It is the oldest bargain in the sea songs. Our other post in that world, Fiddler's Green, is sung by an old fisherman looking back at the same choice from the far end of it. And the traditional world the Waterboys stepped into in those sessions is the world of songs like Raggle Taggle Gypsy, which sits in our set too.

The 100-songs fact is our favourite part of the story, and we tell the short version in our 60-second Short on the Spiddal sessions.

To read more: Wikipedia's Fisherman's Blues page lays out the full session history — Windmill Lane, San Francisco, Spiddal House — and the album's chart performance.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"The Jolly Roving Tar" is set in Belfast. A sailor named Johnny comes home with money in his pocket, the lassies love him while the money lasts, he spends a night ashore with his girl, and in the morning he tells her he cannot marry her — he is married to the sea. Then the song turns to the women listening and gives them the warning this post's title quotes: never trust an Irishman an inch above your knee.

It sounds like a song that has always existed. It has not. It was written, on purpose, in an old style, by the leader of the Irish Rovers — and the story of who wrote it, and where, is the Irish emigrant story told in miniature.

Not Traditional: George Millar Wrote It for the Irish Rovers

On the Irish Rovers' album Drunken Sailor (2012), "The Jolly Roving Tar" is credited to George Millar, the band's Ballymena-born leader. It is a modern song written in the manner of an old one — a pub chorus song, built to be shouted along to — and it is not a work shanty. Nobody hauled ropes to it. It was written for the stage and the pub, by a man who knew exactly which old songs he was imitating.

That album does double duty in our set: our post on All For Me Grog is about another track from the same Drunken Sailor record. Drunken Sailor itself and Haul Away Joe are the real work songs of the sea cluster, and this song is their shore-going cousin.

Back in Belfast Town: The Song, Verse by Verse

Johnny's story is the sailor's shore leave told without varnish. Back in Belfast town, the lassies are glad to see a tar with pay in his pocket — until the money is spent, and then the welcome thins. He has his night with his girl. In the morning comes the reckoning: he would marry her, he says, but he is married to the sea, and the sea does not give its husbands back.

The last verse stops telling the story and starts giving advice. "Come all you bonnie lasses, and a warning take by me" — and the warning is the title of this post, with the price attached: he'll leave you in the morning with a daughter or a son. Then the chorus rolls back in — pass the flowing bowl, boys, there's whiskey in the jar — and the room sings along with the man the song just warned them about. That tension is the song. The warning is sincere and nobody in the pub is going to act on it. It pairs naturally with our Irish Pub Song post: the same room, the same chorus, the same cheerful refusal to learn.

Careful: There's Another "Jolly Roving Tar" (Harrigan, 1885)

Search this title and you will find two songs wearing it, and they have nothing to do with each other. The other "Jolly Roving Tar" — also called "Get Up Jack, John Sit Down," Roud 2807 — was written by Edward Harrigan, words, and Dave Braham, music, for the New York stage show Old Lavender in 1885. It was still being sung in the 1940s, when it was collected from Lena Bourne Fish in New Hampshire, who had learned it from an old whalerman.

Harrigan is a good Irish-American story in himself — he grew up on "Cork Row" by New York's East River shipyards — but his tar is not Millar's tar. One is an American stage song from 1885; the other is an Irish Rovers song from a 2012 album. If a search result mentions Harrigan, it is about a different song.

Emigrants Singing Home: Ballymena to Toronto

The Irish Rovers are a diaspora band. The members were men from Ballymena, County Antrim, who emigrated to Canada and formed the group in Toronto in 1963, after meeting at an Irish function. They were later honoured at EPIC, Dublin's Irish Emigration Museum, as one of Ireland's great exports. So the chain runs: Ballymena men leave Ireland, build a career in Canada singing Irish music, and their leader writes, in Toronto, a song about an Irish sailor coming home to Belfast — a home the Rovers themselves had left. Emigrants singing about the sailor who always leaves again. It is a pub chorus and also a postcard sent in the wrong direction, from the men who stayed away to the port that let them go.

For the facts: The Balladeers' discography of the Drunken Sailor album carries the Millar credit and the full track listing, and Mainly Norfolk's page on the other song of this name will keep any reader who searches the title from mixing the two up.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"All For Me Grog" is a sailors' song that Irish singers made their own. The singer has come ashore with money in his pocket and spent the lot — on grog, on tobacco, and on women — until his boots, his shirt, and nearly everything else he owns are gone. It is sung fast and loud, with a chorus a whole room can pick up after one hearing.

That is part of why the song lasts. It belongs to the same working sea world as  Drunken Sailor and Haul Away Joe: men paid off at the end of a voyage, ashore for a short time, and due back on a ship whether they were ready or not.

What Was Grog? Admiral Vernon and the Navy Rum Ration

Grog was not a general word for drink. It was a specific drink with a specific history: the Royal Navy's rum ration, watered down.

In 1740, Admiral Edward Vernon ordered the navy's rum to be diluted, at about four parts water to one part rum, and served in two portions across the day. Vernon was nicknamed "Old Grog" because of the grogram cloak he wore, and the watered drink took his nickname. What started as one admiral's order became a daily fixture of life at sea for more than two centuries.

The rum tot lasted until 31 July 1970 — a date sailors still call Black Tot Day, when the Royal Navy issued the ration for the last time. So when the singer in this song says all his money went for grog, he is talking about the drink that structured a sailor's day: measured out by the navy, looked forward to, and missed when it was gone.

A Sailor Sells His Boots, His Shirt and His Wife

It has been sung under titles such as "Good Brown Ale and Tobacco," and George Gardiner collected a version in 1906 titled "The Nobby Hat" Regardless of the title and changes to the verses, the song describes an ongoing cycle of a sailor being paid off, proceeding to spend his entire earnings and then some on grog and tobacco. When his wages come up short, he parts ways with different articles of clothing and even his wife. Once his bed is gone his only option is to ship out "across the western ocean" to earn another wage that he will predictably squander in the exact same manner.

This repetitive cycle forms the heart of the song. While lively singing and a boisterous chorus give it a comical air, the underlying reality is grim: a laborer whose pay never survived his leave, bound to a life at sea because no other livelihood awaited him ashore.

There is a useful contrast with Wild Rover, the temperance song that pubs turned into an anthem. The Wild Rover repents and goes home to ask forgiveness. The singer of "All For Me Grog" never repents at all. He counts what he has lost, laughs about it in the chorus, and gets back on the ship.

Across the Western Plains: The Song's Australian Life

Folk tunes traveled right alongside the working men who sang them, sometimes across vast distances. When "All For Me Grog" reached Australia, shearers and bush workers adapted the song to reflect their surroundings. They replaced the sailor's "western ocean" with the "western plains," giving birth to the bush song "Across the Western Plains".

This single-word adjustment highlights how these folk songs endured. Rather than being preserved in print, they lived in the memory of laborers who brought them to new lands and tailored the lyrics to fit their daily toil. The shift from a navy rum chant to a shearing shed song worked seamlessly because the fundamental pattern of existence remained identical: strenuous labor, a quick payday blowout, and a return to the grind.

The song achieved broad popularity in Ireland after The Dubliners issued it as a single in 1967, driving the track to No. 10 on the national charts. Within a live performance, it complements other nautical farewells and hard-luck tales such as Leave Her Johnny and Fiddler's Green.

It sits naturally in a set alongside the other farewells and hard-luck songs of shipboard life, Leave Her Johnny and Fiddler's Green.

To learn more about the history of the song, Mainly Norfolk's page on “Good Brown Ale and Tobacco / All for Me Grog” is the best place to dig.

— hear us play it live (video above).

Ask a sailor where a sailor goes when he dies, and for two hundred years the answer has been Fiddler's Green: a place of perpetual mirth, where the fiddle never stops playing, the dancers never tire, and nobody ever has to ship out again. It is the sea's version of heaven, built by men whose working lives were cold, wet and dangerous, and it sounds exactly like the shore leave they dreamed about.

The song "Fiddler's Green" carries that idea into the folk repertoire. What surprises most people is its age — or rather, its lack of one.

What Is Fiddler's Green? The Sailors' Heaven Explained

The idea itself is old, even if its origins are obscure. The sailors'-paradise Fiddler's Green is documented in print by the mid-1800s — the Houston Folk Music archive cites Frederick Marryat's 1856 novel The Dog Fiend — and the name appears to come from shore, not sea. Before it was heaven, "Fiddler's Green" was also a name for the dockland districts sailors frequented on leave: the streets of taverns, music and dancing around a port. The imagination did the rest, turning the best night ashore into the afterlife itself.

That double meaning is the whole idea in one phrase. A sailor's heaven was never going to be clouds and harps. It was going to be the dockside pub, made permanent.

Written in 1966: The “Traditional” Song That Isn't

The song was written in 1966 by John Conolly, a singer from Grimsby, England. It is so often taken for a traditional song that Conolly has had to reclaim his own royalties on it — folk discographer Mainly Norfolk calls it exactly that, and lists early recordings by Tim Hart and Maddy Prior in 1969 and by the Clancy Brothers with Louis Killen in 1972. The Dubliners carried it too, and through the Clancys and the Dubliners it settled into the Irish repertoire, where it has lived ever since as if it had always been there.

It belongs on the sea-songs shelf of this blog, alongside our shanty pair Haul Away Joe and Leave Her Johnny, and the question every pub crowd knows, Drunken Sailor. Those are working songs. Fiddler's Green is the retirement plan.

From Irish Troopers to the US Cavalry

Fiddler's Green also marched inland. The Cavalrymen's Poem — the "Fiddlers' Green" verses recited in the United States Cavalry — was first published in the US Army's Cavalry Journal in 1923, from a story attributed to Captain "Sammy" Pearson, telling it around a campfire in Wyoming's Medicine Bow Mountains. It remains a US Cavalry tradition, kept today by associations including the 1st Cavalry Division Association: half a world from the sea, troopers took the sailors' paradise and made it their own.

The Irish thread runs straight through that cavalry tradition. The 7th US Cavalry, many of whose troopers were Irish-born, marched to the tune "Garryowen" — from Garraí Eóin, Owen's Garden, a place in Limerick — which reached them by way of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers. An Irish place-name, carried to the American frontier by Irish soldiers, ended up as one of the most famous march tunes in US Army history. That Garryowen is the same Limerick district in our post on Sean South of Garryowen.

So an English songwriter's 1966 song about a sailors' heaven travelled through Irish singers, Irish troopers and American cavalrymen — and came back into Irish pubs, where we sing it now.

To read more: Mainly Norfolk's Fiddlers' Green page

 is the standard folk discography for the song, with its recording history. The 14th Cavalry Association publishes he full text of the Cavalrymen's Poem.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Fare thee well to you, my own true love" — "The Leaving of Liverpool" is a farewell song sung by a sailor shipping out from Liverpool for California, promising the woman he leaves behind that he will come back: "when I return, united we will be." It is one of the best-known songs in the folk repertoire, and it survives because one retired sailor in New York remembered it, word for word, more than fifty years after he learned it.

The song is a working sailor's goodbye, not an emigrant's lament — and the port it leaves from gives it its Irish weight anyway.

Collected in New York: Maitland, Tayluer, and the Library of Congress

The song was collected by William Doerflinger from Richard Maitland, a retired sailor living at Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island, in sessions between 1938 and 1940. Maitland said he had learned it around 1885, aboard the ship General Knox, from a singer from Liverpool. His verdict on the song, decades later: "Yes sir, that song hit the spot!"

Maitland was clear about how the song was used on his voyages: it was an off-watch song, a "forebitter," sung for pleasure in the forecastle rather than a working sea shanty. The association with the capstan comes from the second version Doerflinger collected, in early 1942, from Patrick Tayluer at the Seamen's Church Institute in Manhattan. That session was recorded using Library of Congress equipment, and the recordings were deposited at the Library of Congress — where the song sits today because two old sailors sang it into a microphone in New York.

A Sailor's Farewell, Not an Emigrant's Song

The narrator is a professional sailor, and the details in Maitland's version date themselves. He is shipping aboard the David Crockett, under Captain Burgess, bound for California around Cape Horn. Burgess commanded the David Crockett out of Liverpool between 1863 and 1874, and died at sea in 1874. The singer is not leaving home forever; he is signing on for a voyage, and the whole song leans on his promise to return.

That sets it apart from the true emigration songs in our set. The people in Thousands Are Sailing and American Wake were leaving a life, not a berth. This song pairs the other way: with Leave Her Johnny, the homeward-bound farewell sung at a voyage's end.

Liverpool: The Port a Million Irish Left From

The port is the Irish connection. During the years of the Great Famine, 1845 to 1852, over a million Irish people left from Liverpool's shore. For most emigrants, Liverpool was the last ground of the old world they stood on. A sailor's song that begins on that dock, looking back at the shore, carries that history in its setting even though its singer is a sailor who means to come back.

Irish acts made the song a standard at home. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had a top-10 hit with it in Ireland in 1964 — the story of that band's rise is told in Inside Irish Music's video on the accident that launched the Clancy Brothers — and Bob Dylan adapted it for his early song "Farewell."

The collection history, including the Library of Congress account, is at Wikipedia, "Leaving of Liverpool", and the National Museum of Ireland's Irish Emigration to America — The Journey covers Liverpool's role in the crossing.

— hear us play it live (video above).

"Leave Her Johnny" is a sea shanty with a rule attached to it: you could only sing it at the very end of the voyage. "Leave her" means leave the ship — to walk ashore in port and be done with her. The song is the crew's farewell, and its verses are where sailors finally said what they actually thought of the ship, the food, and the officers.

It is a call-and-response work song like the other shanties in our set, including Drunken Sailor. But this one was saved for a single job, on a single day, and singing it at any other time could get a man in serious trouble.

The Last Shanty of the Voyage

"Leave Her Johnny" was a pump shanty, sung while working the pumps — and specifically reserved for the last spell of pumping after the ship was tied up in port. Joanna Colcord, in Roll and Go, described it as "the sailor's farewell song, in which he expressed without fear — since the voyage was over — his opinion of ship and officers."

That "without fear" is the key to the whole song. The verses complain: about the food, the work, the officers, the ship herself. At sea, a crew depended on those officers for its safety and its rations, and complaints had consequences. Tied up in port, with the articles nearly run out, the men could finally say it all out loud — and they sang it while they did the last pumping the ship would ask of them.

Why Singing It Early Was Almost Mutiny

Because the song was a list of grievances, timing was everything. The shanty writer Frank T. Bullen warned that to sing "Leave Her Johnny" before the last day or so of the voyage was "almost tantamount to mutiny."

That is not a figure of speech. A song that rehearses everything wrong with a ship, sung by the whole crew in rhythm while they work, is one step from a refusal to work — and everyone aboard knew it. So the song stayed in its box for the whole voyage, however long that was, and came out only when the port was made and the pumping was nearly done. Different jobs at sea had different songs, and the contrast is easy to hear: Haul Away Joe is a halyard shanty, sung to haul sails up; this one is a pump shanty, sung at the end of everything.

Born on the Emigrant Packets?

Stan Hugill, the last of the professional shantymen and the great collector of the tradition, believed "Leave Her Johnny" probably originated around the time of the Great Famine in the 1840s and was first sung aboard the Western Ocean packets — the Liverpool-to-America ships that carried the emigrant traffic across the Atlantic.

The earliest evidence for the song places it in the 1860s, in the recollections of Captain W. B. Whall, published in School and Sea Days in 1901. Hugill printed it in Shanties From the Seven Seas as both a halyard and a pump shanty. If Hugill is right about the packets, then this farewell was sung on the same class of ship that carried Irish emigrants west — the farewell of the crew who made that crossing over and over, paired in our set with Fiddler's Green, the sailor's picture of heaven.

The lyrics in their variants, including the pumping version, and the Colcord, Bullen, and Hugill history in one place, are at Main Sail Cafe, "Leave Her, Johnny".

— hear us play it live (video above).