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A swashbucklin’ oral history of how sea shanties took over TikTok

Nikolay Nikolov

If you’re not already singing along to a bunch of 19th-century songs about whale hunting, then dive into this sea of shanties. 

British group The Longest Johns helped the digital revival of sea shanties with a 2018 recording of "Soon May the Wellerman Come,’ which has since seen nearly 30 million streams on YouTube and Spotify. They help us deconstruct how and why those old songs of isolation struck such a chord for so many today.

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