Sailor's sea songs and shanties are still popular, even though the ships where they were sung are long gone. Instead these songs have been relocated into a corpus of folk-songs. This study aims to show how song-books focused on sea songs and shanties portray the traditional aspects of these song, with emphasis on musical and textual aspects. Those aspects are largely undescribed vis-á-vis the history and function behind the songs. To demonstrate this a number of 20th century song-books have been studied and put in relation to literature regarding sea songs and shanties. This study shows that sailor's songs in song-books portrays a different image than their traditional counterpart. That is due to what the authors of the song-books include and what they leave out. This is both about the choice of the song as well as what is described about them.

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