| Primarily shipboard working song, primarily used for whiling away the time at the boards of sail ships. Yet the main reason for singing it was work - being very rhytmical songs, sea shanties allowed to synchronize pulling a line by a group of people. Therefore different kinds of shanties were sung when the work required short or long moves etc. The shanties has evolved and they still do. Their history in Poland is particularly interesting. They were 'adopted' here over twenty years ago, becoming more and more popular since then. First translated from English and later being written by our singing sailors, they came through many transformations, as nowhere else in the world. Today we sing not only the classical shanties - the ones reminding of the work at the sail ships - but also the ones popular in the taverns or under the ship's deck (sounding very modern in some arrangemwnts), fishermen's ballads or a typical Polish invention, the Mazurian sailors' song or the songs for children. |
|
