The 2021 Sea Shanty Revival

How TikTok brought sea shanties to the world

In the final days of December 2020, a 26-year-old postman from Airdrie, Scotland, posted a short video of himself singing an old whaling song. He stood in front of a plain wall, sang a cappella, and kept time by knocking on a desk. Within weeks, his video had been viewed millions of times, topped the UK Singles Chart, and triggered a global wave of interest in sea shanties that journalists rushed to call "#ShantyTok."

The postman was Nathan Evans. The song was "Wellerman." And the revival it sparked turned out to be far more than a fleeting internet trend.

The Longest Johns: the group who started it all

The story actually begins a few years earlier, and a few hundred miles south of Airdrie — in Bristol, England. In June 2012, four friends sang a sea shanty together at a backyard barbecue for a joke. Within a week they had posted their first YouTube video — a rendition of "Haul Away Joe" filmed in a kitchen — and called themselves The Longest Johns.

Over the following years the group built a dedicated following in the folk music community, releasing three albums and hosting live sessions that attracted tens of thousands of viewers. Their 2018 album Between Wind and Water included a recording of "Wellerman," a 19th-century New Zealand whaling ballad. In 2019 they began a series of YouTube videos serenading players of the online game Sea of Thieves, and their "Wellerman" recording circulated on Reddit, Tumblr, and early TikTok.

The spark was already smouldering. It was waiting for someone to blow on it.

Nathan Evans and the moment it went viral

Nathan Evans had been posting sea shanty videos on TikTok for months before "Wellerman" exploded. He had heard The Longest Johns' recording and taught himself the song. His version, posted on 27 December 2020, was raw and unpolished — exactly right for the platform. TikTok's duet feature allowed other users to layer their own voices directly onto his video, and they did so in their thousands. Harmonies were added, then instruments, then bass lines, then full arrangements. The song assembled itself collaboratively across the internet, exactly as a shanty once assembled itself on a working ship.

By January 2021 the video had eight million views. Evans signed a deal with Polydor Records — a division of Universal Music — and released an official version of "Wellerman" on 22 January 2021. A remix with producers 220 Kid and Billen Ted followed shortly after, and the remixed version reached number one on the UK Singles Chart. It was the first entirely a cappella sea shanty ever to reach the top of that chart.

Streaming numbers reflected the scale of the moment. Spotify reported a 7,000% surge in streams of The Longest Johns' original recording. The group's album Between Wind and Water entered the Billboard Americana/Folk Albums chart at number 13 in the United States. Both Evans and The Longest Johns found themselves the subject of major-label bidding wars — The Longest Johns ultimately signed with Decca Records in the UK and Verve Records in the US.

Why did it resonate so deeply?

Commentators at the time offered many explanations. The most persuasive pointed to the coincidence of circumstances: millions of people in pandemic lockdown, isolated at home, robbed of the communal experiences that sustain ordinary life — concerts, pubs, sport. Sea shanties, with their call-and-response structure and their roots in collective labour, offered something that felt both ancient and urgently relevant.

Evans himself put it plainly when he told CNN: "I think it's because everyone is feeling alone and stuck at home during this pandemic and it gives everyone a sense of unity and friendship. Shanties are great because they bring loads of people together and anyone can join in. You don't even need to be able to sing."

The folk music scholar John Archer, speaking to The Guardian, drew a sharper parallel: young people in lockdown were, he suggested, in a situation not entirely unlike that of 19th-century whalers — similarly marking time, similarly cut off from the world, similarly waiting for something better to arrive. The Wellerman, the supply ship in the song bearing sugar and tea and rum, became an accidental metaphor for the vaccine, for freedom, for the end of an exhausting wait.

There was also something about the format of TikTok itself. The duet feature meant that singing a shanty online was a genuinely communal act. You were not just listening passively — you were joining in, adding your voice to a chain of voices that stretched around the world. That is, in essence, what a shanty always was.

A note on "Wellerman" and what a shanty actually is

One detail that generated considerable discussion among folk music enthusiasts at the time: "Wellerman" is not, strictly speaking, a sea shanty at all. It is more accurately described as a forebitter or sea song — a type of song sung by sailors during their leisure time, not while working. True work shanties, such as the hauling and capstan shanties described elsewhere on this site, were purpose-built for coordinating labour. A self-respecting sailor of the 19th century, the old saying goes, would not be caught singing a shanty in his downtime for fun.

"Wellerman" is a ballad — it tells a continuous story across its verses — and it was sung for recreation rather than work. This distinction matters for those who study maritime music seriously. For the millions who discovered it in early 2021, it mattered rather less. What it did, regardless of category, was send enormous numbers of people toward the genuine shanty tradition, and that can only be a good thing.

The lasting impact

Viral moments on the internet have a reputation for burning bright and vanishing. The sea shanty revival has proven more durable than most.

The Longest Johns have continued to record and tour extensively, releasing their fifth studio album, Voyage, in 2024 and a sixth, Pieces of Eight, in 2025. Their YouTube channel, which had 245,000 subscribers at the height of the 2021 moment, has grown substantially since. They remain one of the most active and visible groups working in the maritime folk tradition.

Nathan Evans built a full music career from his TikTok moment, releasing The Book of Sea Shanties: Wellerman and Other Songs from the Seven Seas in October 2021, a collection of more than 35 shanties with commentary. His profile helped bring shanty-adjacent content to audiences who had never previously engaged with folk music.

Sea shanty festivals, which had been a niche enthusiasm before 2021, reported significant increases in attendance and interest in subsequent years. UK schools began using shanties as an entry point for teaching maritime history. Academics published papers on the mental health dimensions of communal singing, citing the TikTok phenomenon as a case study. "Wellerman" appeared in the soundtrack of the video game Skull and Bones in 2023, and the Seattle Mariners used an Evans remix as a rally anthem at their stadium in 2022.

Most importantly for those who care about the tradition itself, the revival directed millions of curious listeners toward the deep well of genuine maritime music — the hauling shanties, the capstan shanties, the forebitters, the long history of working songs that sailors actually sang while they sailed. That audience is still there, still listening.

Where to go from here

If the 2021 revival is what brought you to this page, there is a great deal more to discover. The shanties featured on this site — Drunken Sailor, Haul Away Joe, Hanging Johnny, Leave Her Johnny, and others — are genuine work songs with histories stretching back to the golden age of sail. The shanty types page explains how each category was used aboard ship. The glossary unpacks the nautical vocabulary that appears in shanty lyrics. And the lyrics pages give you the full words so you can join in yourself.

That, after all, is the whole point of a sea shanty.