Episode Details

Roud Folk Song Index number 322, the shanty about what to do with a very inebriated sailor early in the morning, was built as a tool, not a song. Its first published appearance is an 1839 account of a whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut, and sailors recalled using it while tacking ships on Maine's Penobscot River in the 1820s. It shares its chord progression and structure with the Irish song Oro Se do Bheatha 'Bhaile, and its Dorian mode gives a weathered minor edge to a driving tempo. It was a stamp-and-go shanty: 30 or 40 men gripped a line and marched down the deck in step, so every boot struck together and the load never faltered.

When packet ships and clippers cut crew sizes, walkaway hauling died and the song adapted to hand-over-hand hauling, capstans, and even dragging a scraper under an iron hull, as an 1870s sailor told folklorist Alan Lomax in 1939. An English sailor of the 1860s recalled only two working verses, a drunken sailor and a drunken soldier, and the catalog of punishments grew later. By the early 1900s it was sung at Eton College and London's Savage Club, then absorbed by Percy Grainger in 1924, Malcolm Arnold in a 1943 woodwind quintet, the Robert Shaw Chorale, and a Fred Kaan Easter hymn. Fiddler John Baltzell recorded it as a dance medley in 1923.

• Pere Ubu turned it into the post-punk track Caligari's Mirror in 1978.
• An Irish pop group took a disco version into the Irish top 20 in 1981.
• It turns up in Ringo Starr's You're Sixteen, The Truman Show, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the 2019 film Fisherman's Friends.
• Parody verses have targeted the Exxon Valdez spill, the Tailhook scandal, and the ship that blocked the Suez Canal.
• In 2026 an Iranian Lego-themed video used it to ask what should be done with Pete Hegseth.