The students' message of pro-Kremlin support comes as Russian forces are advancing from staging areas in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region towards Kramatorsk, which continues to be hit by rocket attacks, according to a British military update today. The shanty ends with the message saying 'With Russia in our hearts'. 'Be proud of the motherland! Remember the heroes for centuries! Glory to the holy land! Russ-ia!' They sing: 'There lies on the land a big country, beautiful and honest, strong in the soul, rich in nature and spreading wide - Russ-ia! Young women seemingly dressed in World War I-style nurse uniforms form the letters 'Z' and 'V' - which are not part of the Cyrillic alphabet but which appear on invading Russian vehicles - and sing about the importance of patriotism, The Times reports. It is now receiving 30,000 streams a day on Spotify.Students from the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic have now released a version of the song with new lyrics, telling listeners to be 'proud of the motherland'
The Wellington Sea Shanty Society recorded Soon May The Wellerman Come on their 2013 album, Now That’s What I Call Sea Shanties Vol 1, and again in 2018. The rising tide of ShantyTok has reached New Zealand shores, too. That recording, by Bristol group The Longest Johns, is showing 8.5m recent plays. “I was singing it with others in folk clubs 40 years ago,” says Archer.Īnd now Wellerman is being circulated further by Spotify by way of its new “sea shanty season” playlist, celebrating “centuries-old songs gone viral”. His Google “guesswork” suggests Wellerman’s composer was a teenage sailor or shore whaler around New Zealand in the late 1830s, who penned the ditty on settling in Australia then passed it down within his family around the turn of the century.įrom there, the shanty is believed to have spread around the world by its inclusion in Colquhoun’s book Songs of a Young Country, published in England in 1972.
Researching that link led Archer to shanties published in The Bulletin paper in Sydney in 1904. Neil Colquhoun – a New Zealand folk music pioneer, who died in 2014 – first documented Wellerman in 1966, from a man then in his 80s who said he had been taught it by his uncle. Its embrace by TikTok is an unexpected 21st-century twist in a folkloric tradition that can be traced through New Zealand’s past. Mentally i'm here /IlinXkqcTH- ˗ˏˋ Hayley DeRoche ˎˊ˗ January 13, 2021 “My guess is that the Covid lockdowns have put millions of young into a similar situation that young whalers were in 200 years ago: confined for the foreseeable future, often far from home, running out of necessities, always in risk of sudden death, and spending long hours with no communal activities to cheer them up.” With the struggle ongoing at the shanty’s end, “the Wellerman makes his regular call, to encourage the Captain, crew and all”.Īrcher suggests that it is the shanty’s “cheerful energy and hopeful outlook” – in contrast to other more “dreary” whaling songs – that has led to Wellerman’s rediscovery on social media. Wellerman’s six verses tell the epic tale of a ship, the Billy of Tea, and its crew’s battle – “for 40 days, or even more” – to land a defiant whale.
As Ronald Jones writes in Te Ara national encyclopaedia, that period of seafaring industry “slipped unobtrusively out of the pages of New Zealand history” – preserved only through song. (Their ship, the Lucy Ann, also went on to be crewed by one Herman Melville.)īut by 1841 the Wellers’ business had collapsed. The brothers Joseph Brooks, George and Edward Weller emigrated from Folkestone, Kent, to Sydney in 1823 and within 10 years had established themselves as the region’s preeminent merchant traders.Īt the time, whaling was a prime export industry of New South Wales while, in New Zealand, the Wellers’ whaling station base at Ōtākou on the Otago Peninsula was the first enduring European settlement of what is now Dunedin city. ShantyTok is taking the wellerman to increasingly more amazing levels! /9Bouf1IEN3- Sly lil´ Vix ~🦊 Foxxie January 12, 2021
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