‘The words which sailor John put to them when unrestrained were the veriest filth’: situating chanteys in the field of porn studies

ABSTRACT

This article grapples with situating erotic chanteys within specific labels that attend to texts that contain sexual material. Erotic songs, like chanteys, are often categorized as erotica, bawdry, or pornography without much investigation into what these labels mean and do to the texts to which they are assigned. Close examination demonstrates that the labels applied to content come to bear on the analyses of those texts and I venture that applying the term bawdry to collected erotic chanteys is the more advantageous label. Succinctly, this term is historically and culturally accurate as a designation, especially when it is applied to songs that were sung during the Great Age of Sail, as it is a term that attaches to other content and contexts that are relatively similar to the content located in some sailing work songs. Throughout, I lean on examples from archival sources to demonstrate the types of content encountered in erotic chanteys and argue that despite examples sometimes meeting with definitions of erotica and pornography, those labels do not fully capture the depth and breadth of chantey narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Bawdry
• sailing work songs
• genre
• erotica

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a comprehensive discussion of ‘Barnacle Bill’ see Simon J. Bronner (2016).