"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).

"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).