Hiking and sea shanties

 Ok, this may be a strange combination, but hear me out. As a long-time lover of folk music, it's been pretty wild to watch sea shanties rise to 21sth-century viral fame. Tiktok's new feature, that allows users to directly harmonize with videos from other users, inspired this trend. My medieval literature professor always said that much of internet creation closely resembles older oral culture, and this is a fine example of that - there's a thousand different versions, everyone adds their own thing without interference of commercial parties, and the results are far greater than the sum of the invidual parts. If you missed the magic of sea shanty Tiktok, here's a few:  

But what has this to do with hiking? A lot, actually. Sea shanties are part of an even wider global (but especially African) tradition of work songs, rythmic call-answer songs that grew out of a need to coordinate all kinds of physical labour and meanwhile make the experience more pleasant. 

Because labour has often been (all too often, still is) forced and dangerous and for low - if any - rewards, these songs don't always have a happy story. They're still an awe-inspiring expression of the enormous resilience of people to create something enjoyable even in the toughest of conditions. There's a wealth of history and culture contained within these work songs.

Hiking is of course not quite comparable. Yet for all its joys, it's still an occasionally mundane physical activity. There are inevitably times the landscape is uninspiring, the weather is unpleasant, you're tired, etc. During those times, it can feel great to allow your mind to drift away from the moment. You can occupy your mind with all kind of thoughts, or with chatting with hiking mates (or even talking to yourself), but there's something uniquely satisfying about singing - words and melodies and rythm creating a flow that makes time and pain dissapear, that makes you feel like you're connected, part of a greater whole.

I've got a lot of memories about singing while hiking. I remember singing marching songs with classmates during the Avondvierdaagse, a dutch walking event for children. During my long-distance group hikings trip in Morocco and Iceland I traded songs with others in the group. Last year in Greenland, I learned the lyrics of all kind of new songs I had downloaded on my phone, but strongly favored the kind of songs with a lot of curse words in them. 

Let me tell you, singing songs with lots of curse words in them makes hiking through this kind of tough terrain much more pleasant :)

There are a lot of folk bands dedicated to keep the legacy of older songs alive, but it's not just old songs, either. New songs that are easy enough to remember and sing make their way into from popular culture into folk repetoire all the time, for example the song Hoist the colors from the third Pirates movie. My 2020 lockdown obsession was (ok, still is) Ye banished privateers, a swedish band who write new songs inspired by 17th/18th century maritime tradition, telling stories of life during that time that are largely still relevant today, covering themes like poverty, bad working conditions, violence, celebration, greedy rulers, piracy, corporal punishment and seperation from loved ones.

We worry so much about whether we're good at the thing we're doing. People are especially scared to sing. Instead of judging the quality of our singing voice, or our feeling for pitch or rythm or whatever, let's focus on the actual, natural joy that is singing. Past and present, we all have stories to tell and to share - so, let's sing a shanty.