A lot of sea shanties on TikTok may not actually be sea shanties, according to old scholarship

Given the mayfly-brief half-life of memes, by the time you read this post, the sea-shanty trend on TikTok (previously and previously) may already be fading.

But over at Jstor Daily, Jess Romeo adds some fun controversy to Shantytok. She unearthed a couple of scholarly pieces from the 1920s and 1930s which argue that many of the songs we landlubbers think of as sea shanties aren't actually sea shanties. — Read the rest