Welcome

This is the working songbook and rehearsal guide for Mayne Singers — a sea shanty crew on Mayne Island, in the Southern Gulf Islands of BC, on the Salish Sea. Four to eight voices, two or three instruments to start, all skill levels welcome.

This book exists so the crew has one shared reference — the same chord sheet, the same key, the same set of voice and instrument notes — instead of seven photocopied half-remembered versions of Drunken Sailor drifting through every rehearsal.

The crew's design principles

Five things we've committed to from the start. They shape every decision in this book, from key choice to set lists to who gets the bodhrán.

1. Vocal-first by design. With only two or three of us playing instruments to start, that's a feature, not a problem. The deepest shanty tradition was sung by working crews with no instruments at all. We build the band around voices and nobody is ever sidelined.

2. The chorus is the engine. Every song is chosen so the crew/crowd chorus is easy and immediate. A brand-new member contributes fully from week one by singing the chorus — no instrument, no audition, no problem.

3. Rotate the shantyman. Call-and-response shanties let the lead move around the room. Don't make one person carry every verse. Spreading the lead is the single most inclusive move available, and it's authentic to the form.

4. Keys serve the voices, not the page. The keys printed in this book are starting points. Drop or raise them to wherever the crew's voices sit comfortably on the night. A cappella numbers get pitched to the room.

5. Robust, not refined. Shanties were sung by tired, half-cut men hauling rope in weather. The right energy is committed, not precise. A wrong note sung with conviction is correct.

What's in here

The book has three layers, each with its own purpose.

The chapters (the sidebar on the left) are the rehearsal manual. They cover the things a shanty crew collectively needs to be good at:

• Voice as Instrument — how the voice actually works, and how to keep yours healthy when you're singing two hours of rope-pull music a week.
• Singing Together — harmony, blend, leading and following, and the call-and-response dynamic that makes a shanty a shanty rather than a chorus.
• Practice Structure — how to run a rehearsal of four to eight voices so it actually moves songs forward instead of becoming a pub night with chord charts.
• One short chapter per instrument: guitar, mandolin, bodhrán, concertina, penny whistle. Each covers role in the crew, what to play, what not to play, and the handful of patterns that will carry you through the whole repertoire.
• Three song-set chapters: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced — the recommended order to learn songs, plus which ones make the best openers, set-closers, and quiet pivots.
• Roadmap — the 12-month phased plan: four three-month phases, each one a realistic step (kitchen party → sing-around → small public outing if the crew's ready → an event or local festival slot if one lines up). Underpromise, overdeliver — the spine of how the crew grows over the year.
• Resources — where to go when this book runs out.

The songs (the homepage and the All Songs page) are the repertoire — ~36 songs, grouped on the homepage by difficulty so it's easy to see what to teach a new member first. Each song is a ChordPro file you can transpose live in the browser, print as a single page for the rehearsal pile, or download to your phone. The plan: weighted heavily toward Canadian and UK roots — Stan Rogers, Great Big Sea, Newfoundland trad, English / Scottish / Irish trad, and a handful of universal shanties.

The playlist is a queue of reference recordings — Stan Rogers' live takes, The Longest Johns, traditional 78s in the public domain. Listen before a rehearsal to lock the tempo, the feel, and the harmony lines in your ear.

Who this is for

A small mixed-skill crew on a small island. Some members will read music; most won't. Some will have sung in a choir; most won't. Some will pick up a new song in fifteen minutes; some will need three rehearsals on the same chorus. The book is structured to make all of those experiences work in the same room.

The instruments — guitar, mandolin, bodhrán, concertina, penny whistle — were not chosen because they're the historically authentic ones (the real shanty crew had none of these on deck). They were chosen because they're what a modern shanty crew actually uses: a rhythm section the singers can lock onto, plus melodic colour for the verses and instrumental breaks.

The voices are the band; everything else is support.

Three entry points

Every member of the crew, regardless of experience, can plug in at one of three rungs and climb at their own pace.

1. Sing the chorus. Show up, sing the chorus on every song, leave. That's a full contribution. Most of the room will be doing this most of the time.
2. Pick up a percussion instrument. Bodhrán, shaker, spoons, hand-claps — a one-week learning curve, real impact in the mix. Anyone can start tonight.
3. Lead a song. Take the shantyman role on one tune that's yours. The lead rotates — nobody owns every song forever. By Phase 2 of the roadmap, every member who wants to lead has at least one tune that's theirs.

You don't move up a rung when you "graduate"; you move up when you feel like it.

How to use it

First rehearsal of a new member. Send them this URL. Have them read the Welcome chapter and skim Voice as Instrument before they arrive. Pick one song from the beginner set (start with Roll the Old Chariot), learn the chorus together in ten minutes, and let them carry that one song home.

Between rehearsals. Each member should sit with the chord sheets for next week's songs, transpose into their own comfortable key (the + / − buttons in the song toolbar), and listen to the reference recording at least once. The crew's collective tempo and feel locks in faster when everyone's pre-loaded the song.

At rehearsal. Print the chord sheets, or work off phones. Don't try to read tiny lyrics off a 5-inch screen while holding a bodhrán tipper. The print button on each song page is sized for a single landscape page.

The song-type legend

You'll see one of these four type-codes attached to every song in the repertoire chapters:

Mayne Singers' repertoire is roughly: 7 halyards, 11 capstans, 12 forecastles, 6 pub singalongs. The mix gives every set a natural dynamic arc — loud rope-pullers, smooth capstan grooves, quiet ballads, and rowdy crowd-singers.

Why ChordPro

The songs are stored in ChordPro format — a plain-text format that interleaves chord names with lyrics:

[D]What shall we do with the [A]drunken sailor

This format renders into the chord chart you see on the song page, but it also:

• transposes live (use the + / − buttons),
• recalculates capo positions,
• prints clean,
• opens in Obsidian Chord Sheets and most ChordPro editors,
• and is plain text, so it lives in git, diffs cleanly, and never goes obsolete.

You can add a song by dropping a .cho file into the songs/ directory — see Resources for the format.

The discipline

Shanties are working songs. They were sung by men who had to coordinate physical labour together, often in bad weather, often when they were tired, often when they didn't really feel like singing. The right energy is robust, not refined. If a rehearsal ends with the crew slightly hoarse and grinning, it was a good rehearsal. If it ends with everyone politely nodding at clever harmonies, find a different repertoire — shanties are not art-songs, and trying to make them precious kills them.

Vocal first. The chorus is the engine. The crowd is the song.