The music of the pirates and freed African slaves

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones will always be the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll outlaw. This musical prince of thieves who stole a sound and then our hearts, this enigma who held us all to ransom on pain of a thousand riffs… Keith Richards speaks to us like no other, before or since.

No wonder then that Johnny Depp sought to emulate his every mannerism in his Pirates of the Caribbean movies, right down to the wheezy diction that only a lifetime of serious cigarette smoking could have created.

In fact, such was Depp’s sense of homage to the wizened rocker that Richards was asked to make a cameo appearance in one of the Pirates series. Let’s face it, apart from defining the course of rock music over the last six decades, this was a piece of typecasting that had his name on it right from the start.

And therein lies the most delicious coincidence imaginable. For Keith Richards’ predecessors – the real-life pirates of the Caribbean – were quite probably the first exponents of world music, mixing the folk songs of their native British Isles with the sounds created by the freed Africans liberated from the slave ships they had captured.

And therefore, by extension, arguably anticipated the musical upheavals that would occur 300 years later during the middle of the 20^th century, when a similar process created rock ‘n’ roll.

The age of pirates did not last long. Once the merchants of London, Liverpool, and Bristol realised that pirates posed a threat to their trade in human beings, the British Royal Navy was despatched to eradicate this threat to their profits.

By the middle of the 18^th century, piracy in the Caribbean had virtually been eradicated, the activity’s most dedicated practitioners rotting in gibbets in London’s Execution Dock and elsewhere.

However, decades before, the English authorities had encouraged piracy – then called privateering – to help fill their own coffers. And back then, all of England’s European enemies on the high seas were fair game.

During the 16^th century, Spanish colonists of the New World shipped back to Spain fabulous quantities of gold, silver and jewelry, looted from the native peoples of the Americas.

England’s Queen Elizabeth decided she wanted her country to have a share in these riches. And so, notorious privateers such as Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher and John Hawkins reaped the rewards, robbing Spanish and French ships at will, and all of this being sanctioned by the authorities.

But this state of affairs would change as Britain, along with other major European countries, became heavily involved in the African slave trade.

For now, the rules of the game had been changed, with no ship escaping the pirates’ attention. Regardless of nationality, anything with masts and sails was fair game. So where does the musical element come into this story?

Pirates devoted themselves to lives of drunken debauchery, a permanent existence of hedonism that was only interrupted when a ship was sighted on the horizon, and it was time to replenish their drink and treasure chests.

From small fishing boats to relatively well-armed merchantmen, all craft were targets. And those included slavers, which is why pirate crews often had a high number of former captives among their number, only too happy to swap a long life of servitude for a possibly shorter one spent in thieving, carousing and sexual excess.

Joseph Mansfield, a former highwayman who had swapped robbery on dry land for thieving at sea, probably spoke for many when he said that ‘the love of drink and a lazy life were stronger motives with him than gold.’

And yes, while pirates certainly loved to drink, they also shared their liking for alcohol with perhaps an equal devotion to music.

Infamous pirate captains such as Bartholomew Roberts – Black Bart – were very aware that music served as a useful distraction to lawless men, who were certainly as capable of turning on him as they had done on ships where mutinies previously occurred. Best to keep them happy, yes?

Most pirate ships had musicians on board, and such men came into their own after a ship had been plundered, and the ill-gotten gains were being enjoyed to the full.

As the pirates drank the looted fine wines and brandy, they would be entertained to the sound of fiddles, oboes, and trumpets. Pirate ships were all-male domains, and as women were not welcome aboard – mainly for superstitious reasons – any dancing was, by definition, a single sex activity.

This was not necessarily down to sexual preferences, because whenever a ship docked in a pirate stronghold such as the island of Roatan, just off the coast of Honduras, their crews would make the most of any female company available.

In his excellent book If a Pirate I Must Be (Aurum Press Ltd) author Richard Sanders writes that it would be fascinating to hear the music created by these racially hybrid crews.

The songs sung by conventional sailors to accompany such strenuous activities as raising the anchor, setting the sails and working the pumps bore strong resemblance to African work songs with their use of call and response patterns.

Renowned Australian author and blues expert Paul Merry also makes the same point in his celebrated book America’s Gift, in which he discusses the musical kinship of the blues to sea shanties and other work-related songs.

Here’s an example. The famous rhyme in the classic work Treasure Island, which the evidence suggests is authentic, was one such tune…

Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest (Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum) Drink and the Devil had done for the rest (Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum)…

Sanders writes: ‘A single voice sang the first and third lines, the men singing the second and fourth together as they pulled on the ropes or windlass. Sailors’ ‘laments’ have also been described as an early form of the blues.

‘If sailors’ music generally bore a strong African influence, this was heightened further among pirate musicians who lived side by side with large numbers of slaves for such lengthy periods of time and were largely cut off from the musical influences of their homelands.

‘Pirate ships were one of the earliest crucibles for the great fusing of African and European music, which would be such a feature of the musical life of the Americas for the next 300 years.’

So, there we have it. And that’s where Keith Richards’ comes in again. For I suspect that the legendary rock ‘n’ roller would certainly have found any number of kindred spirits had he been sailing the Caribbean of the early 18^th century… and no doubt those pirates themselves would have also recognised him as being one of their own. Johnny Depp certainly did….