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Last week James Revell Carr, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Kentucky and a scholar on maritime song, was watching the chaotic news cycle on TV when he had an idle, discouraging thought about his area of expertise. “You know, I’ll probably never get called for any kind of news thing again,” he recalled on the phone from his home in Lexington. “What possible way could sea shanties come up in the news?”
Then, like Moby Dick rising from the muffled rollings of a milky sea, shanties roared into the here and now. On TikTok, a Scottish postman-musician’s take on the old song, “Soon May the Wellerman Come,” went viral. Within days the invigorating work-song and others of its ilk, sung to keep rhythm during laborious, group-driven jobs, had overtaken the social media platform and flooded into the larger cultural conversation.