Hailing from the port of Toronto, ON, Pressgang Mutiny have been roaring out songs of the sea since 2013. Local favorites in their hometown and on the Canadian and American East Coasts, they are keeping alive a vital tradition of work songs that represents the world’s first truly multicultural music. 

Who’s in Pressgang Mutiny, and how did the band come together?

The current lineup is Richard Kott, Michael O’Grady, Stefan Read, our DJ (Chaotic Vibrance) and myself, James McKie. 

The origin story of the band goes back to the summer of 2013, when I was on tour with Lemon Bucket Orkestra in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, and Serbia. 

It’s kinda funny because it wasn’t that long ago, but long enough ago that we didn’t all have smartphones and roaming data. So some of us started singing to pass the time in the long van rides crisscrossing Eastern Europe. I had fragments of sea shanties in my brain from earlier stages of my life, and some of the other band members really took to them. A few days into the tour, I was determined to start a sea shanty group when I got back to Toronto. The original lineup of Pressgang Mutiny was largely members of LBO, and we did our first gig about a month after we got home in the fall of 2013. 

Your music blends the harmonies of traditional sea shanties with contemporary music production tools like synths and drum machines. What do you think makes these seemingly disparate ingredients travel well together?

It was a bit of a happy accident. Shortly after starting Pressgang Mutiny, I purchased the Maschine MK2, which is a drum machine and sampler. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was eagerly sampling anything and everything I could get my hands on. I was also doing a deep dive into the shanty repertoire, and at some point it dawned on me that this is great material to sample because it is all capella singing, and because so many of these songs are rhythmic in nature. 

As I continued to explore integrating shanty samples overtop beats and synth parts, it felt like the music was revealing itself to me, rather than me actively constructing it. 

You’ve done quite a bit of research into sea shanties as a genre and cultural phenomenon? What have you learned from that research, and how does it inform both your approach to making music and your appreciation of the form?

I think like many people, I assumed that sea shanties came out of an Irish and British Isles folk cannon, because many great shanties were part of the Folk Revival of the 60’s. While it’s true that shanties were integral in maximizing the efficiency of the small crews of both the British and American merchant marines at the height of the great age of sail in the 1800’s, I was fascinated to discover that the roots of shanties originated in Southern African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities, and then spread outwards and ultimately across the seven seas and worldwide. 

Additionally, many British and Euro-American scholars notated examples of shanties they encountered as they were disappearing by the dawn of the 1900’s, giving their publications an undeserved perception of unquestionable authenticity, replete with an “official” set of lyrics. In truth, the lines that the shantyman sang were always improvised, adapted, or borrowed from another song. Long after the steamboats replaced the clipper ships rendering shanties obsolete, they continued on in small pockets of The Caribbean, in places like St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago. These songs were used in Barrouallie in St. Vincent up until the early 1970’s, and the Vincentian versions were living songs, which commentary about the people and events of the place.

Getting to visit Mr. George Frederick, better known as Tall 12, the last surviving members of the Barrouallie Whalers was an eye opener. The Barrouallie Whalers used their own renditions of shanties as they rowed out to hunt for pilot whales, rather than rely on ore composed material from the previous century. 

This hammered home the notion that shanties were, and still can be a living genre, rather than solely a historical recreation. It’s a perfect template for self expression and for drawing people together musically. 

What do you think accounts for the sea shanty’s recent return to some degree of popularity in the public eye?

That’s an interesting question. The most recent surge in sea shanty popularity is due of course to Nathan Evans’ rendition of The Wellerman. Strictly speaking, a shanty is a call and answer song that was used to coordinate work on and around ships. By that definition, The Wellerman is not a shanty at all, but more so a nautically themed ballad with verses and a chorus. 

Regardless, the song encapsulates many of the themes found in shanties that would have reflected the sailors’ psyche, in this case namely a longing for reconnecting with others in uncertain or perilous times. It was really interesting that this song resonated with so many people during the COVID lockdowns, when people couldn’t gather, and musicians couldn’t get together to make music. It provided people with an opportunity to stitch together layers of harmony through a digital medium. And I think that singing together in all manner of challenging situations was a key feature at the core of the design and purpose of the shanty. 

Along similar lines, what do you think makes the form relevant to today’s world?

I think there is something innately powerful about folk and traditional music from all cultures of the world. It allows us to make sense of who we are by referring back to where we came from. It allows us to feel what people who are no longer with us felt. 

We may not know who any of the ordinary everyday people were who wrote any of the songs and tunes that are passed down to us, but we keep their spirit alive more so than we do any of the exceedingly wealthy or powerful people from those times. 

I’ve also noticed a similar trend with visual and audio formats. Despite the incredible quality and ease of use of digital photography, there is a real resurgence of reverting back to film with many younger photographers. There is a genuine curiosity of understanding how the process worked within a more limiting and imperfect process. I see a similarity with the popularity of vinyl records. It’s as if the more we move forward, the more the past seems to fascinate us. 

How does your music translate to live performances?

We are in an interesting place now as a band, where we can deliver our signature four part a capella harmonies, provide deep dive workshops on the history and evolution of the sea shanty genre, or get on stage at a music festival and amp up the crowd with the help of our DJ and with instrumentation. It all depends on the setting that we are presented with. 

Your new album Departure features musical collaborations with Toronto hip-hop, reggae, and dancehall veterans and rising stars. Who are some of the artists you collaborate with on the album, and what do they bring to the songs they perform on?

We are blessed to have a wide range of incredible musical collaborators on Departure. They range from fellow band members from Lemon Bucket Orkestra, to UK shanty and folk legend Tom Lewis, to other local artists I have idolized over the years. 

We are really fortunate to have so many experts in so many genres of music in Toronto. 

We had collaborations from Terry Wilkins and Al Cross, the original rhythm section for Big Sugar. 

We were really fortunate to get the great Carl Harvey, guitarist from Toots and The Maytals. 

Going further down the Reggae and Dancehall rabbit hole, we got Sunray Grennan in on a few tracks. In addition to being a top tier drummer (and the son of Winston Grennan who invented the One Drop beat), he is an unparalleled lyrical improviser. I used to go see the Toronto Reggae outfit The Sattalites at The Orbit Room, and when the band was about to go on break, Sunray would emerge from the drums while someone else took his place, and would start rhyming about the people and things that were happening in the room. The ease with which he did that always amazed me, it was the highlight of the show to me. When we got Sunray in for Sally Racket, he effortlessly picked up this shanty that was new to him, blended it with the Jamaican folk song Hill and Gully Rider, and then did two flawless improvised vocal takes. When I asked him how he is able to weave a cohesive rhyming narrative while riding the rhythm, he modestly said that he sees a picture in his mind and describes it. It made me feel that this level of lyrical improv proficiency was at the core of what a good shantyman would bring to his crew and ship. 

Similarly, Matt Somber is an incredible up and coming emcee and rap improviser who fronts the Bangerz Brass Band. A few years ago, he joined Lemon Bucket Orkestra on stage, and I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with him at some point. We were looking for an additional element for one of our tracks, and I reached out to him. It was magical to be in the studio and witness what he brought to the track. 

It was so cool to hear how all these musicians from disparate genres were able to add meaningful contributions to our tracks. 

The band has been together for twelve years. What kinds of changes have you gone through together? 

Aside from some personnel change over the years, we went from really enthusiastic singers who knew next to nothing about sea shanties, to hosting The Shanty Show, where we got to do long format interviews with a who’s who of the shanty world. 

We went from being strictly a capella for the first 10 years, to incorporating acoustic instrumentation and digital backing tracks that can be performed live with our DJ. 

We learned as many of the minute details of the tradition as possible and performed them that way on stages internationally, and on Departure have chosen to make connections to many other genres of music in an attempt to recontextualize the lens with which we view shanties and make it a living genre. 

Do you have any plans to promote Departure with a tour?

Yeah, we are planning on spending the month of August touring in the UK. We have a bunch of confirmed festival dates, and are booking some additional gigs around those. 

What else is on the horizon for you? 

I’m really excited to continue collaborating with a wide range of artists. I’d love to put some artists in the driver’s seat to lead shanties with their own lyrics and original vocal melodies. 

I’ve also got almost enough newly crafted production tracks to assemble another shanty remix album. 

Beyond that, I’m really happy for us to stay true to the shanty tradition while keeping on pushing the boundaries of what they can be, and sharing that with as many people as possible.