The Dead Horse Shanty

We dig into the "Dead Horse Shanty," a truly weird sea shanty that was at the center of an old-school sailor party. Our guests are Stephen Winick from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and musical artist Dr. Julian Saporiti, who's also known for his No No Boy project.

Transcript

LOC Mixtape |Transcript | Episode 101 - TheDeadHorseShanty

[Audio Intro: LOC Mixtape theme sting, “This is LOC Mixtape.”]

Postell (narration): Welcome to LOC MixTape. I'm Postell Pringle. I've spent the last 20 years performing the world over, writing, singing, acting, rapping, producing music, and generally acting a fool. And most of all, remixing. I've sampled and repurposed hundreds of unbelievable sounds to make new songs. But now, I'm digging into the stacks of the largest library in the world to make the ultimate mixtape.

The Library of Congress has over 4.3 million audio tracks in its collection, and I'm linking up with a few friends to find the best, craziest, most inspiring songs in the library, learning who made them and why. And then - we'll mix it up. We got all sorts of amazing recording artists coming through to make new songs inspired by those classics.

Let's hit the record button, y'all!

[Music: Instrumental sting, source clips]

Postell (narration): Anyone will tell you there are millions of different directions you can go with a Mixtape. But I knew the kind of song I wanted to get into…a sea shanty, and yeah, I know what you're thinkin’ “This dude is buggin. For real? A  sea shanty?” To which I say (sings) –

Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all

Buddy ta na na, we are somebody, oh 

Thank you. Thank you. I got my love for sea shanties from singing them with my a capella group, the Deansman. One of my dearest friends in the group, Benjamin Tassinari from Chatham, New York, was for real, the kindest, most gifted human I've ever been lucky enough to know. 

Benny Taz grew up in a loving and large, talented family. In the summer, he sailed tall ships at Mystic Seaport and Catalina Island. He even sailed with the famous research vessel Endeavor. While at sea, he learned boatloads of shanties. 

Then, with his banjo and his dog Shady by his side, my man, Taz sang them for us, his friends. Naturally, we sang along 'cause like, what's better than singing loudly with your friends?! So we sang shanties in concert, at parties, even just hanging out. 

[Music: Vocal Performance of Essequibo River, by Ben Tassanari:

Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all

Buddy ta na na, we are somebody, oh 

Oh Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all

Buddy ta na na, we are somebody, oh 

Somebody oh, Johnny, Somebody oh

Buddy ta na na, we are somebody, oh

Oh Essequibo Captain is the king of captains all

Buddy ta na na, we are somebody, oh]

Postell (narration): Whenever I hear shanty, I think of my homie Benny Tassinari, who passed away in 2007. Yo Taz, the song's for You, pal.

[Audio: Sounds of a ship at sea]

Postell (narration): It's 1842, we’re shipmates sailing the deep blue seas, hoisting ropes, trimming sails, battening down hatches, y’know, stuff that sailors do. But today, it's party time! You know any party has to have the right music. So, we crank up the volume - meaning, we sing loud together, and this is what we sing. 

[Music: Primary Source, Dead Horse Shanty: 

Oh, poor old man came riding along

And we say so and we hope so. 

Poor old man came riding along

Oh, poor old man.

Say old man, your horse, he will die

And we say so and we hope so

Say old man, your horse, he will die 

Oh, poor old man.]

Postell: Yeah, I know. I know… It's not exactly an old school banger you’d throw on to get the dance floor moving, but trust me, ain't no party like a sea shanty party 'cause a sea shanty party - don't stop. So, I had to know more about who sang this weird song and why. And despite my love for a good shanty, I'm nowhere near an expert. So I called up the shanty guy of all shanty guys, StephenWinnick, Folklorist at the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.

[Audio: Sounds of a tape deck turning on.]

Postell: Hey Steve. How you doing? How you doing? Good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Stephen: Pretty good. You too. Thanks for having me.

Postell: Steven, why don't you tell us what you do at the library?

Stephen: Well, my job title is Folk Life Specialist, which means that I'm an expert on folklore for the government. I have an academic background in studying and analyzing traditional culture of various kinds, and we have a giant archive of traditional folk songs and traditional folk music. We do a lot of public programming, a concert series and a lecture series, and I'm part of producing those. I answer reference questions for people who have questions about our materials. So I'm a sort of generalist, but I'm an expert on traditional folklore.

Postell: Cool. A generalist and a specialist. You literally do it all. 

Postell (narration): Clearly, as you just heard, Steve knows a thing or 200 about sea shanties. So before we got into the dead horse story, I wanted to hear more about sea shanty history in general. So let's talk about what was the peak sea shanty era? Like what time period are we talking about?

Stephen: Yeah. The peak era was probably about 1850 to 1900. That was the 50 years of the most sea shanties. But they started a little bit earlier than that. We know that people continued to sing them on working vessels until the 1920s when steam almost entirely replaced sail, and that's why the songs died out.

Postell: Yeah. I would love to get some context now, like who sung shanties? Where did they sing them? What was the purpose of them?

Stephen: Shanties were songs that were used to coordinate labor. On these ships, you wanted to carry as much cargo as you could, and that meant carrying as few people as you reasonably could in order to maximize the amount of cargo. And that meant being able to do the most work with the least number of people. One of the ways that they figured out to do this was to use songs to coordinate their work.

Postell (narration): What he's describing, call and response, is an essential music technique sailors used. The way Steve breaks it down: the shanty man, who's pretty much the lead singer, sings the first line of a lyric. Then the working sailors repeat the line or sing a different line in response, like a musical conversation. Sailors would haul rope, hoist sails, or whatever hard labor was happening on the ship while singing in rhythm. Shanties are by definition call and response songs. 

Postell: So I have a question for you. Or I should say maybe a request. But I would love to get just an example of what that call and response would be. Any song, because I know you have a whole library of shanties in your head.

[Music: Stephen singing:

A Yankee ship come down the river, blow boys blow. 

Her masts and spars, they shine like silver, 

Blow me bully boys blow.]

Postell: So what part would the guys sing?

Stephen: So the working men would just sing, "Blow boys blow," and "Blow me bully boys blow." And the shanty man was singing the other parts. And one of the advantages of that system was that you can learn those two parts –"Blow boys blow," and "Blow me bully boys blow" – in about five seconds, right? So if you were starting the song and you don't know it, you can still sing it. If you are one of the sailors pulling, only the shanty man has to know the whole song.

Postell: By the way, you have a very nice tenor.

Stephen: Oh, thank you.

Postell (narration): Like I said before, I heart a sea shanty, but enough of the niceties. Let's get down to business. The Dead Horse Shanty—the version of the song we're using was recorded in the 1930s at a retirement home for sailors. The song was passed down from sailors who, for real, belted these words at sea. Take a listen.

[Music: Primary Source, Dead Horse Shanty:

Thirty days is past and gone, and we say so, and we hope so. 

Thirty days is past and gone. Oh, poor old man. 

No more bills we have to pay, and we say so and we hope so. 

No more bills we have to pay. Oh, poor old man.]

Postell (narration): This isn't your run-of-the-mill "Blow the Man Down" shanty. They're singing about thirty days and bills to pay and a dead horse. In truth, it's super weird, which made me more curious. After we dug this out of the archive, we simply had to know all about it. Steve is the man. He filled me in.

Stephen: So the Dead Horse Shanty is interesting because it's unique among sea shanties, as far as we know, in that it was primarily ritualistic. It was a song for doing work that didn't need to be done. It was being done as a ritual. And the ritual was that they created an effigy horse, which they then hoisted up onto a yard and dumped into the ocean.

Postell (narration): For context, when Steve said yard, he meant a long horizontal pole that's used to hang the sail from. We're going to get to effigy in just a second, so hold tight. Or should I say hold your horses? Get it? 

Postell: Can you describe what an effigy horse, can you describe what that would've looked like?

Stephen: Yeah. It was basically a fake horse made out of barrels and wood and canvas and string and all those kinds of things, but it was like a wooden horse puppet or model.

Postell: So then what was the ritual? What would they do with that thing?

Stephen: Well, they would hoist it up onto a yard and then dump it in the ocean and leave it behind. So, yeah.

Postell: But why would they do that? Like, what was the meaning behind that?

Stephen: Yeah, so they typically did it thirty days into the voyage, so one month into the voyage. And what it was representing was the fact that they had been paid a month's advance before they got on the ship and had spent that money already on shore before they got on the ship. So they were one month's pay in debt to the ship by the time they left the port. And because of that, all of their work up until thirty days in, they weren't getting any money out of that work. 

And so that was referred to as working for a dead horse. And it's part of the same sort of little cluster of expressions that we have in English, like, "beating a dead horse." Basically, the dead horse is something that's futile or, you know, is already expired, doesn't have any use anymore.

Postell: Money already spent. 

Stephen: Yeah. And so now they were actually earning money. They had a little celebration, and that typically occurred thirty days in, and one of the things they did was to dump the dead horse. Leave the dead horse behind. Why it became so popular, why people thought of doing that specifically is a mystery, but it's just one of those great artistic things that humans do when we're put into these situations.

Postell: So I can say personally, I always throw a little celebration every time I get a paycheck.

Stephen: Yeah.

Postell: So I mean, I kind of, at least on a small level, I get it. 

Postell (narration): Hold up. Let's recap. So we got sailors voyaging at sea. On day thirty, all their land debt is paid off. So obviously they turn up on some "Poor Old Man," while dumping a DIY puppet horse into the sea. Sounds like a rager.

Stephen: This was more or less a halyard shanty. And if you think about it, so what the halyard is, it's for raising sails by pulling ropes hand over hand. And that's exactly what they were doing with this effigy. They weren't raising a sail, but they were raising an object up onto a yard by pulling on a rope.

Postell: So I'm just imagining them pulling these things and whether or not that actually played into where the downbeat goes or something like that?

Stephen: Yeah, that's exactly how it worked. So the purpose of the song was to give everybody the same downbeat so they would be pulling at the same time.

[Music: Primary Source, Dead Horse Shanty: 

Hoist him up to the main yard arm, 

Oh we say so, and we hope so

Hoist him up to the main yard arm,

Oh, poor old man]

Postell (narration): Oh man. Beyond the Dead Horse Shanty specifically, I was interested in what these sailors had in common besides the fact that they were all waiting to get paid. We know ships at this time had folks from all over the world, different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities.

Stephen: One of the things that's interesting about sea shanties is that the general popular understanding of them – if you ask people to picture a sea shanty group – it's a bunch of white guys, right? But the fact is that African Americans were very important to the preservation and the singing of sea shanties back in the age of sail. And it's something that's a little bit misunderstood or neglected, I think, in today's impression of the way shanties work.

Postell (narration): Thanks to Steve, I know all about the Dead Horse Shanty. Kind of makes me wanna build a puppet horse and throw a party on a boat. Sounds fun, actually. But before I let Steve skate out of here, I had to pick his brain about sea shanties in the present day. Shanties haven't really been used at sea for over a hundred years, and yet I'm betting you've heard one before. Perhaps the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song or the sheer absurd number of people singing shanties like "Soon May the Wellerman Come" on TikTok during the pandemic. If you missed it, look it up. It was a thing. I asked Steve what he made of the whole moment. 

Postell: Shanties have just, like, blown up. And why do you think that's happened? Why is it relevant to the, like, community of young people or, for that matter, even old people today, and how this music may, like, resonate for contemporary musicians and artists?

Stephen: One of the things is just that it has that combination of familiarity and seeming simplicity with weirdness. Like, what is this? What is this about? And the big TikTok success of "Soon May the Wellerman Come" – 

I mean, to a lot of people, the lyrics might be almost gibberish. What are people even talking about? What is the Wellerman? All of that stuff just seems really alien, and yet it's put into this very appealing form and it makes you want to know about it. So people go and actually read up on what this song might mean. 

I think another thing that TikTok helped with was just, you know, certainly during the pandemic, it was just a way that people could interact artistically when they couldn't get in front of each other's faces, really. So it's just a technological way of achieving the kind of community that already would've existed when traditional songs were being sung. Sea shanties in particular, it's hard to say why they became the thing, but I'm glad that they did. It was a fun little moment in history, for sure.

Postell: Cool. Cool. Dude, thank you so much, Steve. 

Stephen: Thank you.

Postell: Stephen Winick. I mean, honestly, you were the man in so many different ways, let alone shanties, you know… The generalist and specialist Stephen Winick. 

Stephen: This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

[Music: Primary Source, Dead Horse Shanty:

One more drag and then belay,

Oh, we say so and we hope so

One more pull and then belay,

Oh, poor old man.

Belay!]

Postell (narration): Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Press that pause button y'all. After a great hang with Steve, it's time to mix it up. I mean, we don't call it LOC mix tape for nothing. Let's create a new song using these themes of the Dead Horse shanty.

And fortunately, I know just the fella to do it. Dr. Julian Saporiti is an unbelievable singer songwriter in Portland, Oregon. That doctor you heard in the front of his name, it ain't just a rap alias. My man has a PhD in Ethnomusicology and American Studies from Brown University. His No No Boy project is a collection of albums about the Asian and Asian American experience. And beyond the actual history in there, the music is equal parts brilliant and breathtaking. Julian was the perfect fit for this project. I was super curious to see what he'd do with the sea shanty. He sent back a demo of a gorgeous song. We sat down to chop it up about it.

[Audio: Sounds of a tape deck turning on.]

Postell: Julian, thanks for joining us, man. I really appreciate you.

Julian: Yeah, really happy to be asked to play some music for y'all.

Postell: You blessed us with such a beautiful, beautiful song. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and also tell us about No No Boy?

Julian: Yeah, so my name's Julian. I live in Portland, Oregon currently, and for the last 25 years of my life, I've been a professional musician in some regard. I'm from Nashville to begin with, so that kind of helped. But the No No Boy project stemmed out of my graduate work, actually. It's a set of albums and concerts that I've done all over the country that basically uses music, songwriting, folk music, as well as projected images and sound recordings to try to teach history as a bit of a Trojan horse.

Postell: Can you give us an example of some of the pieces that you did?

Julian: Yeah, the No No Boy Project was something I worked on for about ten years. It was through my master's and my dissertation, and instead of doing a normal school paper, I wanted to actually reach an audience, which I knew I could because I'd made a living as a musician before. At least, like, you know, more than the people – basically three people read your dissertation. Ever/

Postell: Dude, I'm just kind of imagining you working on your dissertation and being like, "Only three people? Nah, nah, nah, nah. These dudes are gonna hear me. More than three people are gonna hear me."

Julian: Dude, that's how it happened, man. I was at a conference in Washington, DC a week after the 2016 election and I was feeling really bad. And I was given this paper on a jazz band that formed in, of all places, in a Japanese internment camp during World War II in Wyoming where I used to live. And I thought this story was so inspiring that despite it all, despite being imprisoned because of your race and being deemed a threat to national security on this horrible, like whole cultural level, these people still brought their instruments behind barbed wire and made music for people to dance to. I was like, "They're, that’s my people, those musicians." So that turned into this song called "The Best Goddamn Band in Wyoming," which has since reached a lot more people than, I don't know, check Spotify, whatever.

Postell: And which is a super dope song, by the way.

Julian: Thank you, man. Appreciate that. Right, so…

Postell: I love that song, bro. 

Julian: You could like the history and admire the history if I had presented it to you in an article or a book. But love, right? That's what music can do. That's why Bruce Springsteen is so effective. That's why – you're from Atlanta – that's why Outkast lives in my brain every day forever. Yeah, word, because of the way they use great hooks and great music, but say some real things. You know? That kind of stuff. Whether it's pop music, rock music, folk music, or even sea shanties, as we found out.

[Music: Dead Horse Ceremony (Poor Old Man) by Julian Saporiti: 

Poor old man came across the sea, 

And I know so, and I say so.

Red-faced and burned like an effigy…(fades)]

Postell: I would imagine sea shanties can, on some level, be—especially nowadays—the furthest thing from a natural approach to a song.

Julian: Yeah. I mean, it was a challenge, honestly, when y'all threw this at me. I was like, "Sea shanties?” Any other genre would've been better. I would've been more inclined to rap for you than do a sea shanty.

Postell: Hey, well that's coming up next, bro. That's coming next season. Next season. 

Julian: Get the vocal dexterity going. Yeah, it was a challenge because that music really hasn't, it's so associated with a culture and an occupation in particular that it was hard to get in, as far as music that I would naturally sing. But I do love music, and I do respect any musician, no matter how far or disconnected temporally from me, I find commonality with musicians. That's a lot of the history that I study is musicians during different time periods, under different circumstances. So in that way, it's my historian's tool as an academic that allowed me to listen to this song, you know, as grainy and kind of warbly as the recording is.

[Music: Primary Source, Dead Horse Shanty:

…Your horse he will die, 

And we say so and we hope so…]

Julian: And try to find, "Okay, if I'm gonna write something off of this or in conversation with this, or use this melody and these themes in some way to tell a story that I can feel comfortable telling," well, that's an interesting project. So I laid into the history of it. I thought of these musicians singing on the boat or on shore. I thought about the context of this song about debt and, and all the ways we can accrue debt. 

And then also, the real connection here was thinking about the generation before me, of the people I come from, which is Vietnamese people who had to leave our country because of a war. And thinking of a lot of the people who, most of them sailed over to the United States – they were boat people, that's how they left the country. And thinking about, in particular, some of my friends who are also younger Vietnamese folks like myself, their fathers, who were soldiers in that war, and the debt that can never be repaid to them for taking that time by anyone, but also the debt you can never repay if you're on the losing side of a war. You're always in debt for the rest of your life. 

And I've seen these men up close and I've seen the ghost in their eyes. And more importantly, I've seen how they've left the children fatherless in a way. And it all comes back to this idea of paying off a dead horse. You know? It was a good metaphor.

[Music: Dead Horse Ceremony (Poor Old Man) by Julian Saporiti: 

Lost in the mist, but a mile from the coast

And I know so, so I say so,

Holding a fatherless child,

Holy daughter of the ghost of this poor old man…(fades)]

Postell: So you spoke deeply about how you sat with the work and the imagery that came to you and how you actually began to piece together a narrative that you actually wanted to tell. But also, on the nuts and bolts level, how did you approach the work in terms of actually creating the song?

Julian: Yeah, it was quite simple because the tune itself – as a musician, I can hear anything and I hear it musically, and I can appreciate that, so that's like step one. And there's a really good melody here. So I took part of that. I changed it up a little bit. And there's also a nice refrain where the chorus of the men come in and say, "I know so, and I hope so." And so I had stuff to work off of. 

And I keep a lot of the lyrics, like "the poor old man." So the skeleton is there. I do add a bridge because it's completely monotonous, and especially singing it solo and not while sailing and not while working – the whole purpose of these songs, right – to imagine I'm performing the song for a radio listener or a podcast listener. I wanted them to have a little bit more musical intrigue. So there is a bridge in which we sing, "Spend the rest of your life, paying off a dead horse," which I just love as a metaphor.

[Music: Dead Horse Ceremony (Poor Old Man) by Julian Saporiti: 

Spend the rest of your life

paying off a dead horse.]

Julian: But as far as the nuts and bolts, it was mostly there already. It was just kind of reinterpreted, set to harmonies by playing guitar to make it a little bit more musical. It's a much more meditative, contemplative, like, solo sung endeavor.

Postell: I was gonna ask, what made you decide just to do that soft solo guitar?

Julian: Well, I was feeling real raw this week. We're recording this the first week, first full week of November 2024. And for whatever reason I was feeling very raw and emotional. And, you know, my family history is always triggered whenever the news starts talking about immigration, 'cause that's the family I come from. And so that was just sort of on my mind, um, when I sat down to write this song. And when I sit down, I usually sit down with my guitar, 'cause again, I am from Nashville, Tennessee. It's just kind of, you're born, you get an acoustic guitar.

Postell: That's your, yeah, your chosen tool.

Julian: Yeah. And so I harmonized to the melody that was sung in the original. It was more that the lyric came to me very quickly in the middle of the week. I just saw this, like, really beautiful figure. My "poor old man" transformed from an American sailor to a Vietnamese soldier coming across the sea, coming to California where the song was recorded, maybe in the seventies. So the song just sort of came out, but I sat with the song for a long time, but for some reason, this week made me think of certain things and I found the ideas of debt – cultural debt, spiritual debt, political debt—to be really resonant.

Postell (narration): When I listened to "Dead Horse Shanty" and thought about its meaning, a great rap song I love kept popping into my head. It's called "Chapter 13 (Rich Man vs. Poor Man)" by rapper and actor Common. Common raps: "Check it. I didn't grow up poor poor, but once you get grown and out on your own, bills upon bills upon bills is what you have. Before you get your check, then you already spent half. See, I make money, money doesn't make me." All these themes we were talking about – our debt to society, to our community, to our families, debt to the generations before and after us, the constant struggle to keep your head above water, so to speak, it all related back to the dead horse idea and ritual for me. So naturally I told my man Dr. Julian about it. 

Postell: You know, if we want to make it an allegory for ourselves and our lives, getting out on the ship, doing the work, and then having to wait for the dividends to come back to us in some way.

Julian: Yeah. And most of us just keep sailing. Like maybe some of us get really lucky, you get super rich, or maybe you get super enlightened and you get off the ship. I mean, I'm a Buddhist person, so all that is just acknowledging that you are in debt, life is suffering, and trying to get past that in your own mind. And it's a very hard thing to do. 

So its such a… I'm so pleased that you asked me to work with this song because we're having a conversation about what Common is touching on, or my own cultural identity, which is completely different from that, or, and it all starts with these Californian sailors back in the 1800s, 1900s. It's wild, the connections, but that's the American project, which is quite beautiful and interesting and completely in debt in so many ways. 

Postell: Yeah

Julian: Because even the three points of connection that you brought up – listening to Common and whatever his biography was writing those lyrics and whatever my biography is writing these lyrics – completely different backgrounds, somehow connects to these old sailors singing this song. That's an amazing thing and testimony, it really is, to the beauty of artistry and music and maybe why we do this useless work, because we have to connect with each other and we have to keep sailing, and that's an awesome thing to do.

Postell: Yeah, dude, man, you're the best, man. You’re the best.. Yeah.

Julian: I appreciate y'all. Yeah. Good luck with the rest of this. And I enjoyed the interview you did with Stephen too, so that was cool.

Postell: Absolutely, man. All right, take care.

Postell (narration): Big, huge shot of gratitude to my man Dr. Julian Saporiti, aka No No Boy, for chopping it up with us about his incredible work and his approach to the beautiful song he composed and recorded in conversation with our primary source audio for this episode.And without further ado, this is the Dead Horse Ceremony, Poor old man, by Julian Saporiti. Enjoy. 

[Music: Dead Horse Ceremony (Poor Old Man) by Julian Saporiti: 

Poor old man came across the sea,

And I know so, and I say so,

Red-faced and burned like an effigy,

This poor old man.

Lost in the mist but a mile from the coast,

And I know so, so I say so,

Holding a fatherless child,

Holy daughter of the ghost ,

Of this poor old man.

Spend the rest of your life paying off a dead horse.

Ooooh ooooh ooooh oooh 

Spend the rest of your life paying off a dead horse. 

Those poor old men, they bet it all on a dead horse, 

And I am so, so I say so,

No amount of money will ever get us back to shore,

Poor old man.

Poor old man.]

Postell (narration): There it is. A fresh, new, beautiful track to our mixtape. Thanks to Stephen Winnick and a big shout of gratitude to my man Dr. Julian Saporiti for mixin’ and mashin’ with us today. And remember, there are millions of audio tracks to dig through and inspire you. Go to loc.gov. Start with one, see where it takes you. And now press the stop button in 3… 2…1.

[Audio: Sounds of a tape deck turning off.]

[Music: Instrumental]

Credits: 

The Library of Congress Mixtape was produced by audiyo-yo, FableVision Studios. Created and Executive Produced by Anne Richards and Postell Pringle. Produced by Snow Xue Dong, with Production Support from Ash Beecher and Kaz Long. Hosted by Postell Pringle. Sound Design and Voice Recording by Dan Walsh. Additional Music by Postell Pringle. 

Thanks to our guests, Stephen Winnick and Dr. Julian Saporiti. Very special thanks to the Tassinari family, for the use of Benjamin Tassinari's music. 

Funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, through the Lewis-Houghton Initiative. Content created and featured in partnership with the TPS program does not indicate an endorsement by the Library of Congress. Visit the Library of Congress at loc.gov.