“It’s so cool to see because it’s been our goal and aim for quite a few years now, with making videos in computer games, to get sea shanties and folk music in front of people who have never heard it,” said JD, “because it’s a fantastic genre. The group of four are now realising their mission of the last nine years - to get everyone singing sea shanties. “It becomes a massive fractal because someone records something, and then when the next person does it, everyone records several versions of that and several versions of those again,” he added. “That’s why shanties have picked up there in a bigger way than they have previously on somewhere like Tumblr or Facebook,” explained Dave Robinson. The nature of TikTok, which allows people to record their own video over the top and next to another person’s video, is tailormade for the harmonies of sea shanty singing, which typically have one person leading the song and then more coming in for choruses and harmonies. “Every single time someone created something, it jumped even higher - it brought more people to our channels, it kept on growing, as a spiral up and up until now, it’s suddenly exploded exponentially higher again and busted out straight into the mainstream,” he said. “People started making jokes and memes using the song, because it had already been our most popular for a while so they latched onto that. Sea Shanty Tik Tok involves multiple people around the world adding their own part to a sea shanty The other players’ reactions - and whether they joined in or not - was recorded, and that placed Wellerman, firmly at the front of the idea of sea shanties in a 21st century digital world.įrom there, their videos and clips of people randomly singing Wellerman have gone viral on a number of different social media platforms in the 18 months since, but it is this New Year and TikTok where things have ‘exploded exponentially’, according to Johnathan ‘JD’ Darley. In the second half of 2019, they recorded a video for their version of Wellerman which involved them virtually joining people playing a pirate computer game online, as another member of the digital pirate crew, and then suddenly bursting into the close harmony shanty of Wellerman. And that has held them in good stead in their mission to spread the world of sea shanties to a younger generation. The Longest Johns aren’t exactly gnarly old fishermen, and are more at home on social media than on a ship. But, after a couple of personnel changes, it was only a year ago that the final one of the group was able to commit to going full-time - just before a pandemic hit and scuppered all music artists’ main bread and butter - singing live. The Long Players - Robbie Sattin, Dave Robinson, Andy Yates and Jonathan Darley - formed by singing a sea shanty for a bit of a laugh at a barbecue a friend held to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee in June 2012. The song’s catchy chorus sings of longing for one of those supply boats, the Wellerman, to ‘bring us sugar and tea and rum’. The whaling boats would be out for weeks or months on end, and the company would send supply boats out stocked with food and drink to meet up and keep them going. It was written and first sung as a shanty by the crews of whaling boats working for the biggest whaling and export company out of New Zealand, named Weller.
The song is called Soon May The Wellerman Come and was recorded two and a half years ago by the Bristol group, but it and them being at the heart of this new global viral craze is no fluke - it’s something they’ve been working towards for years.
The latest phenomenon from the video-sharing app has gone mainstream and involves people recording themselves singing along to a 180-year-old song, sung by a shanty group from Bristol called The Longest Johns. It’s the newest viral craze for 2021, and has catapulted four Bristol men onto the world’s stage: Sea Shanty TikTok.