@catsalad
Pirates never played accordions
🏴☠️🚫🪗
(Because they hadn’t been invented yet)
Accordions were invented during the 1800s Industrial Revolution at the same time as the telegraph, steam engine and the typewriter
100 years after the Golden Age of Piracy 1600s–1700s
So every pirate movie with an accordionist is a science fiction movie with a time-travel sub plot 🚀⌛️
And those Pirates you mention also didn't sing shanties; because they hadn't been invented yet.
Shanties were the work songs of merchant seamen from approx. the late 1820s and reported to be dying out in the late 1870s.
So, a 19th century working-class culture hijacked into "Pirate" fantasy-land.
PS. also, no, not every song mentioning the sea or sailors is a shanty.
@ecadre @AccordionBruce @catsalad
Well, wait a second... Dana reported work songs and shanties. And Hawai'ian long talk.
@ecadre @AccordionBruce @catsalad
Nope, checked my dates; Dana was 19th century; for some reason I think of him as 18th.
@ecadre @AccordionBruce @catsalad
There it is: Complaynt of Scotland, printed 1549. Chapter 6. Monologue Recreative (one of the first texts written in Scots, but published in France) has references to maritime work songs - and in particular their use in raising the anchor. https://web.archive.org/web/20220517010218/https://northernrenaissance.org/cacophonous-catalogues-the-complaynt-of-scotland-and-the-monologue-recreative/
@Amgine @ecadre @catsalad
Makes sense people would sing work songs whatever they called them
I heard the shanty tradition got stronger because the crews on commercial ships were worked so hard they needed the songs to coordinate the low-numbers
Royal Navy ships didn’t have them (as much?) because they had enough crew to do the work?
Veering, of course here
🧊 🚢
@AccordionBruce @ecadre @catsalad
My reading suggests much of the shanty tradition came through the Royal Navy, primarily due to so many sailors. The primary instruments were drum, whistle, fife, horns, and fiddle. This tradition added 'strums' - various instruments with stretched-skin sound boxes - once slave trade was established in the Caribbean.
@AccordionBruce @ecadre @catsalad
Heh, wait until the purists pull their tools to flay me. "There are no instruments in shanties!" etc.
Just a sailor, who should head down to the boat to prepare for the incoming weather.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
AccordionBruce
Andrew Wigglesworth
Amgine