Remember, in 2021, when TikTok was suddenly awash with sea shanties? It remains one of the most inexplicable, albeit wholesome, online crazes of the pandemic era: a tide of videos of young men (mostly men) with beards and nice sweaters adding layers of harmonies to ancient seamen’s work songs. For a hot minute, these a capella folk songs about a sailor’s sorry lot were the coolest music on the planet — and all because a Scottish singer called Nathan Evans uploaded a video of himself singing “Wellerman,” a whaler’s shanty originating in New Zealand.
It was a fun moment, but Ubisoft beat TikTok to it. In 2013, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, the pirate-themed entry in the historical action series, went hard on shanties. Alongside the original score by Brian Tyler, the game features dozens of collectable sea shanties that your crew will sing as you sail the Jackdaw.
The shanties are a hugely atmospheric addition to the Black Flag‘s seafaring exploration, emphasizing that the Jackdaw isn’t just another video game vehicle. It’s a vessel driven by the backbreaking labor of a crew, who have their own sorrows, cravings, stories, and jokes. The shanties bring home the camaraderie, loneliness, and sheer durational length of life on the sea — aspects of a pirate’s life that would otherwise be flattened out or trivialized by the mechanics of a big video game like Black Flag.
So we’ll forgive that the majority of them are huge anachronisms. Most shanties, like the famous “Drunken Sailor,” originate in the merchant navies and whaling fleets of the 19th century, a hundred years or so after Black Flag is set. (There are some period-appropriate examples in the game, like “Captain Kidd,” a song about the famous 17th-century Scottish privateer.) Black Flag‘s shanties aren’t historically accurate, but the vibes are strong, and ironically they do a lot to situate the player convincingly in the game’s era.
I never played the original Black Flag, but stumbled across its songs when getting into shanties a few years ago. My gateway song was “Leave Her Johnny,” a particularly fine sailors’ lament about going ashore and leaving behind the bad food and arduous conditions aboard a “rotten tub.” The rendition of this shanty from Black Flag features high on Spotify’s sea shanties playlist, right after Nathan Evans’ version of “Wellerman,” and consequently it has almost 75 million plays.
As well as just being a great song, what struck me about “Leave Her Johnny” was the rawness of the recording. It notably lacks the smooth, close-miked, tightly layered harmonies of the ShantyTok sound and goes for something more authentically folky and live-sounding, without any instrumentaion at all. It’s belted out with real conviction and gusto. In fact, the singers who put together Black Flag‘s shanties, including Seán Dagher, Nils Brown, Michiel Schrey, and Charlotte Cumberbirch, did use some multitracking to beef themselves up enough to sound like a full crew. But the rough, unadorned sound is crucial to its authenticity. It also really lets the songs, and their stories, breathe. There’s an absolutely hair-raising rendition of “Lowlands Away,” a ballad in which a sailor foresees the death of his love in a dream just before reaching land. It’s shot through with desperate longing.
The new remake Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced slightly expands the game’s sea shanty collection, and Ubisoft has published a comprehensive 57-song album to celebrate. Nobody really needs Woodkid’s new version of “Leave Her Johnny” — despite its doomy, cinematic orchestration, it’s notably less dramatic and moving than the sparse original recording. Sarah Green’s moving “The Parting Glass” is a much better new addition. Mostly it’s great to have it all in one place: the original a capella shanties, the game’s smattering of flamenco tunes, and the full folk band recordings, including a magnificent version of the epic shanty “Spanish Ladies.”
In both the original and the remake, Black Flag‘s sea shanties are evocative but defiantly unglamorous. They sell a romantic fantasy of life on the high seas while extolling the hard, filthy, lonely existence that built the fantasy. They look beyond the captain’s (and the player’s) adventurous quest and give voice to the everyday lusts and regrets of the crew. How many blockbuster video games do that?