For Hugill and his ethnomusicology it’s a place where different traditions come together and are borrowed and reworked toward a common goal.
For Rediker, it is a prefigurative movement toward true democracy (of men). In Melville it’s a metaphor for a world where white European men (sometimes literally) stand on the non-European men to exploit the natural world.
Like Melville’s Pequod, the crews of shanty singing ships were likely a mixture of Europeans and non-Europeans, and this demographic make-up is also supported by the work of Marcus Rediker. Musicians, historians, dilettantes: he has a stronger claim than all of us. Shanties are an acceptable topic because they are folkways, and folkways are crucial to identity, be it occupational or national. Hugill was a sailor he has the right to write about what he writes about. Unlike those of us who write about, say, videogames, Hugill’s multiple audiences didn’t ask of him their own set of standards. Sam Hugill’s Shanties from the Seven Seas, first published in 1961 (my edition is from 1994) by Mystic Seaport. I understand that it is possible to evoke scores of drunk, untrained, “authentic” singers without actually employing them.īut that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to learn more about shanties! So I made a few emails (I know a historian who knows a musicologist) and was recommended I wasn’t entirely surprised when I found out that the shanties in latter-day Assassin’s Creed games were sung by classically trained singers. It doesn’t actually have to BE old, it just has to look/sound/feel old.
#Assassins creed black flag sea shanties series
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series traffics in a very specific kind of history: part historical fact, part paranoia, and part, for like of a better term, aesthetic.