How to play Drunken Sailor on cajón

A full cajón part for the traditional Drunken Sailor: a driving one-bar groove, a call and response shape, and the easiest whole song on this site.

Tempo: 128 BPM
Time: 4/4
Feel: straight
Bars: 16
Difficulty: brand new

clickfollow128 BPM · 0:30

Call4 bars · 1 written ×4

verse

Driving quarters on the bass with a snare on 2 and 4. A shanty is work music and it should sound like something being hauled on.

Response4 bars · 1 written ×4

chorus

Ghosts fill in so the answering phrase has more motion than the call. Same accents, busier surface.

Everyone in8 bars · 1 written ×8

chorus

Double bass into beat 3, which is what makes a room stamp. Hold this to the end without speeding up, which is harder than it looks at 128.

Legend: B bass · S snare · g ghost · · rest. Written at 128 BPM.

Play it and find out how you did

The backing plays in your ears while you record, so Rafa hears only your box. He will tell you how consistent you were and whether you drifted across the take.

I have headphones on. Out of a speaker the microphone hears the backing too, and it gets counted as your playing. The take would be meaningless.

128 BPM

If you have owned a cajón for a week and want to play an actual song from beginning to end tonight, this is the one. Three sections, one groove underneath all of them, and a form so familiar that people will join in before you have finished the first pass.

Call and response is the arrangement

A shanty alternates a line from one voice and an answer from everybody, and the cajón part should do the same. The call is bare, the response fills in with ghosts. Nothing else changes. That contrast is the entire arrangement, and it is a good demonstration that arranging is mostly about deciding what not to play.

The tempo trap

Shanties are work songs and work songs accelerate. At 128 with a room singing along you will be at 140 by the third chorus unless you are deliberate about it. That is not a character flaw, it is what everybody does, and it is exactly the thing you cannot detect from inside your own playing. Record a take and look at the drift.

If you are brand new

Play only the call section, all the way through, and ignore the rest. Bass and snare, no ghosts, four beats a bar. That is a real cajón part and it is enough to hold a song together. Exercise 2-3 is that skeleton on its own, and how to play cajón covers the three sounds if any of them are still shaky.

The exercise underneath it

2-3 - Backbeat skeleton

Bass on 1 & 3, snare on 2 & 4 - the skeleton of pop music.

Practise it with Rafa

Read about this

Your first cajón grooveOne bar that fits half the songs you already know, step by step.
How to play cajónThe whole instrument on one page, in the order that actually works.