The word shanty, referring to this kind of song, turns up in the 1850s in the context of shipboard singing. Properly speaking, shanties are work songs sung aboard ships and boats. Off the bat, I should say that some people use the phrase “sea shanty” to mean any song sung by sailors, but the word had a more specific meaning in nautical culture.
In the meantime, we thought we’d outline some of our shanty collections at the American Folklife Center, in case any ShantyTok fans want to find more songs to adapt! We made a condensed version of our introduction to shanties into our new podcast episode, which you can download here. If you don’t do TikTok yourself, you may have seen videos on Twitter or Facebook featuring everyone from large groups of young people to identical clones of Bernie Sanders singing a New Zealand whaling song called “Soon May the Wellerman Come.” If you’re interested in the TikTok trend, you can read more about it in this article at Slate. If you’ve been out recently on the high seas of social media, you may have noticed sea shanties becoming a viral trend on TikTok. "Walworth said, ‘You know, it's possible you could make this boat electric.’ As soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘Well, now I have to make that happen,’" Litmer told us as we, very quietly, pulled out from the marina.Clipper ship Three Brothers, 2972 tons: The largest sailing ship in the world. I sent them an email and told them that I wanted to build the most environmentally friendly boat that I could."Īt some point in the conversation, the concept of a fully-electric boat came up. I had known of Joe and Dave since I was 22 working on my first boat. "With Squid, we wound up working with an MIT-educated Naval Architect named David Walworth and a boatbuilder named Joe Kitchell. (Litmer is not a boatbuilder, typically a prerequisite for that kind of thing.) "I didn't have boatbuilding experience when I started, I literally read books and talked to friends and just threw myself at it," Litmer said as we boarded Squid, the electric boat he built, from which he runs his ecotourism company, Honest Eco. Never one to take the easy route, Litmer chose to do what some may, justifiably, consider a little nuts-build his own boat and start his own company. Then I went around the docks and talked to people who worked on boats until I found one I could get on," he said with a smile. I started meeting people and found a room to rent. I lived in a tent at a campground on the next Island up. "When I first got to Key West I didn’t really know anyone or what I was going to do.
And, he’s a guy who isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and get to work.
Litmer has an infectious energy about him he’s a burly man with a hearty laugh, a thick beard and a quick mind. "I got dropped off in Key West about 48 hours later." "After that trip I went home, milled around for a week, and bought a bus ticket," he told us. The weather was beautiful, the water was pristine and the people were nice.
Born and raised in Kentucky, Litmer came down to Key West on a road trip with a college buddy. The sounds of hammers pounding and sanders fairing the rough edges of fiberglass the smell of diesel fuel and salt water the sight of boat parts, old two-strokes and toughened, dirty hands holding an icy beer after a long day of work.īilly Litmer has spent most of his adult life in or around boatyards.