There are a great many collections of shanties and sea ballads.
Here are some of the ones we use, as well as some of our favourite books about the sea.
Nicholas Allen, Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
David Atkinson, An Introduction to English Sea Songs and Shanties (London: British Council, 2016)
Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival
(1993; Leeds: No Masters Co-operative, 2010)
Trevor Barnard, ‘The British Atlantic’, in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 111-36
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem Song Book (New York: Oak Publications, 1964)
Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)
Joanna C. Colcord, Roll and Go (London: Heath Cranton, 1924)
William M. Doerflinger, Shantymen and Shantyboys (New York: Macmillan, 1951)
Stuart M. Frank, Sea Chanteys and Sailors’ Songs
(Kendall: Whaling Museum Monograph No. 11, 2000)
Ian Friel, Maritime History of Britain and Ireland (London: The British Museum Press, 2003)
Elizabeth B. Greenleaf and Grace Y. Mansfield, Ballads and Sea-Songs of Newfoundland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933)
James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds
(1992; London: Faber & Faber, 2007)
James Hanley, Sailor’s Song (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943)
Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British Folk Song, 1700 to the Present Day
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985)
Christopher Harvie, A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
James N. Healy, Irish Ballads and Songs of the Sea (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967)
Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
(1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Stan Hugill, Shanties from the Seven Seas: Shipboard Work-songs and Songs Used as Work-songs from the Great Days of Sail (1961; Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 1994)
--- Sailortown (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967)
--- Shanties and Sailors’ Songs (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1969)
--- Songs of the Sea: The Tales and Tunes of Sailors and Sailing Ships (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977)
--- The Bosun’s Locker: Collected Articles 1962-1973 (Todmorden, Yorkshire, 2006)
Gershon Legman, The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography
(1963; London: Cape, 1970)
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000)
A.L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (1967; London: Panther, 1969)
Halford Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (New York: D. Appleton, 1902)
Michael G. Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009)
John Masefield (ed.), A Sailor’s Garland (London: Methuen & Co., 1906)
Hermann Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (1839; Kindle)
--- Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1849; London: Penguin, 2003)
Douglas Morgan (ed.), What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor? Unexpurgated Sea Shanties (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books, 2013)
David Proctor, Music of the Sea (London: HMSO, 1992)
Steve Roud, Folk Song in England (London: Faber & Faber, 2017)
Steve Roud and Julia Bishop (eds), The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs
(2012; London: Penguin, 2014)
Charlotte Runcie, Salt on Your Tongue: Women and the Sea (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2019)
John Sampson, The Seven Seas Shanty Book (London: Boosey & Co., 1927)
Cecil Sharp (ed.), A Book of British Song (London: John Murray, 1902)
--- English Folk-Chanteys (London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1914)
Laura Alexandrine Smith, The Music of the Waters (London: Keegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1888)
Gerry Smyth, ‘Shanty-Singing and the Irish Atlantic: Identity and Hybridity in the Musical Imagination of Stan Hugill’, in Graeme Milne and Catherine Tackley (eds), A Special Edition of the International Journal of Maritime History, 29(2) (2017), 387-406
Richard Runciman Terry, The Way of the Ship: Sailors, Shanties and Shantymen
(Vol. I, 1921; Vol. II, 1926; Tuscon, AZ: Fireship Press, 2008)
Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd (eds), The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs
(1959; London: Penguin, 1969)
W.B. Whall, Sea Songs and Shanties (1910) 5th edn. (Glasgow: James Brown & Son, 1926)
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WEBSITES
The Chantey Cabin
The Mudcat Cafe
mudcat.org Traditional Music and Folklore Collection and Community
Royal Museum Greenwich
Sea Shanty Facts, History and Meanings (rmg.co.uk)