Racially Charged Language in A Sea Shanty

Moralism and Crossing Lines

It was a weird moment. While teaching the new version of the band our songs, I obviously sent around the recordings and asked everyone to learn what they could. You can’t teach a bunch of musicians an entire catalogue note by note. No-one has time for that shit. They have to be able to learn by ear. But this means that I was sending around recordings that I haven’t listened to in like 14 years.

So imagine my surprise when one of the younger band members politely if insistently asked about the, um, racey lyrics in “Roll the Woodpile Down”. And this moment was weird because I had completely forgotten about these lyrics. I was young and brash and didn’t think much at the time and just sang what I thought were the correct lyrics. But listening back, it’s clear that certain things have just been dropped since the 2008 recording of Legends Never Die.

Most obviously, for years I’ve been singing this in concert:

That round gal ‘o mine’s on the Georgia Line
And we’ll roll the woodpile down

But in the recording, as in the original song, the line is:

That brown gal ‘o mine’s on the Georgia Line
And we’ll roll the woodpile down

And this curious, intrepid new band member also reminded me that in 2008, apparently, I also sang:

why do them yellow girls love me so?
because I don’t tell all I know

I couldn’t sing these lines now, I couldn’t bring myself to. That is an instinctive thing of course. But this leads to a very interesting question: what should Shanty singers think about lyrics like this?

Well, here is one thing I am against:

Racist harm: harm or pain inflicted on anyone, directly or indirectly, as a result of demeaning or insulting language directed at members of their race.

And of course there is an argument that language like “brown” and “yellow”, when used to refer to actual persons, perpetuates actual racist harm, so defined. That’s a strong argument. But here’s something else I am against:

Moralism: rushing to a ‘snap’ moral judgment about something based on its superficial qualities without pausing to reflect on relevant contextual factors.

Moralism is everywhere these days; just think about the fact that people are routinely judged en masse by millions of angry or hostile people online for something that appears in a 9-second video clip. This judgment is almost guaranteed to ignore important context. Even if you see what looks like an assault happening in that video, how do you know that what happened before the clip transforms the assault into self-defense?

Moralism is particularly dangerous to art. Artists are very often ironic, intentionally provocative, or otherwise trying to produce a complex reaction in us by displaying things that can look offensive or painful. They may be trying to educate, or to immerse the audience in something fictional and horrible purely for aesthetic value (consider the wild popularity of murder mysteries and shows like CSI, which turn the worst possible things that human beings do to each other into entertainment). Moralism risks missing these depths and pointlessly condemning huge swaths of the artistic world.

So we have to avoid actual racist harm, but we also have to avoid moralism. What does this mean for calling someone a “brown gal”?

One contextual factor jumps out on this one: Woodpile was initially sung primarily by black sailors in the 19th century, likely by African-American riverboat workers. This wasn’t a “minstrel” song designed to degrade or demean black people, it was a song they created out of their own experience working on the water. The “brown gal” reference could easily just be to the singer’s gal. And while it’s not the same for me to sing this line, it does seem clear that this line itself doesn’t have much of a racist history. Moreover, I’ve attended more than one anti-racist seminar where the leader refers to “black and brown people”. To be honest, I wouldn’t really judge a white singer who decided to sing this line; I don’t, but it really seems like about as harmless as a racial reference gets. That gut feeling that something is wrong with it is probably just good old moralism.

“Yellow gal”, on the other hand, is pretty clearly a problem. The only contrary argument here is that to sing a traditional song from 1887 properly, you have to immerse the audience in the way mentioned above, in a practice that we would never permit today but which was common back then. This would be purely for historical edification, like an actor performing a nazi salute in a production of Cabaret.

But this argument could justify anything, I could claim to be “doing art to immerse an audience” while defacing a holocaust museum with swastikas. There has to be a line here. And it seems to me that you can immerse yourself just fine in the life of an 1887 sailor without singing about “yellow gals”, particularly when those gals were probably exploited prostitutes sold into what was basically sexual slavery. And not only does the word “yellow” have an unambiguous racist history, discrimination against those of East Asian descent is pretty much universally acknowledged, whether it comes in the form of outright physical violence, slurs, or even just a diminished shot at an Ivy League admission because of a myseteriously lower “personality” score.

So, yes. I will continue avoid those lines because the risk of racist harm is real, particularly in this latter case.

BUT. I will note that popular music is saturated with far more harmful lyrics, lyrics that essentialize race, lyrics that teach young women to hate their own bodies and reduce themselves to their sexual value, lyrics that fetishize violence, lyrics that champion consumerism and material wealth while the planet burns, etc. These lyrics are vastly more harmful than anything a shanty singer could sing in 2023, even just because of differential audience sizes. But those singers are never going to face a serious backlash, often because of some ill-concieved right that a performer is thought to have to “sing about their own stuff”. For my part, I do not think that, for example, famous rich pop singers have any “right” to make ordinary young girls hate themselves just because they, the singers, are also female. If you’re going to direct any anger at traditional folk music for its harmful lyrics, I want to see you lining up to get just as angry at a lot of modern pop too.

Finally, one suggestion that came out of that practice was to lose the risk of racism and maintain the nautical theme by changing the “gals” to “gulls”. What do you think? Good idea? Not creepy at all? Cawww!