Best Sailing Songs of All Times

Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), professionally known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz singer with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, lead a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills. She won four Grammy Awards, all of them retrospectively, for Best Historical Album. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1973.

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"Come Sail Away" is a song by American progressive rock group Styx, written and sung by primary singer and songwriter Dennis DeYoung and featured on the band's seventh album The Grand Illusion (1977). Upon its release as the lead single from the album, "Come Sail Away" charted at #8 in 1978 on the Billboard Hot 100, and aided The Grand Illusion achieve multi-platinum sales in 1978. It is one of the biggest hits of Styx's career. Lyrically, the song uses sailing as a metaphor to achieve one's dreams. The lyrics touch on nostalgia of "childhood friends," escapism, and a religious thematic symbolized by "a gathering of angels" singing "a song of hope." The ending lyrics explain a transformation from a sailing ship into a starship, by narrating that "they climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies" which also imply biblical verses from Ezekiel.

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"Sail On, Sailor" is a song by American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1973 album Holland. It was written by Brian Wilson, Ray Kennedy, Tandyn Almer, Jack Rieley, and Van Dyke Parks. It was released as a single in 1973, backed with "Only with You", and reached at number 79 on the American singles charts. A 1975 reissue (also backed with "Only with You") charted higher, at number 49. According to Jon Stebbins, "It is perhaps the only perennial Beach Boys favorite to still thrive in the classic rock and album rock FM radio formats of the present.

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"La Mer" ("The Sea") was initially recorded by the French singer Roland Gerbeau in 1945. When Trenet's version was released in 1946, it became a sudden hit, and has remained a chanson classic and jazz standard ever since. Trenet said that he had written an initial version of the song's lyrics as a poem at the age of 16, many years before he came up with a tune for it. The tune came to him while he was traveling by train in 1943 in the south of France. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and in the afternoon he worked out the details with his pianist. That evening, they performed it in front of an audience without much of an effect.

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"When the Ship Comes In" is a folk music song by Bob Dylan, released on his third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', in 1964. Joan Baez states in the documentary film No Direction Home that the song was inspired by a hotel clerk who denied Dylan a room due to his "unwashed" appearance (he was not famous outside of the folk movement at that time). The song then grew into a sprawling epic allegory about vanquishing the oppressive "powers that be"

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"Drunken Sailor" is a sea shanty, also known as "What Shall We Do with a/the Drunken Sailor?" The shanty was sung to accompany certain work tasks aboard sailing vessels, especially those that required a bright walking pace. It is believed to originate in the early 19th century or before, during a period when crews, especially those of military vessels, were large enough to permit hauling a rope while simply marching along the deck. With the arrival of merchant packet and clipper ships and their smaller crews, which required different working methods, use of the shanty appears to have declined or shifted to other, minor tasks.

The Irish Rovers is a group of Irish musicians formed in 1963 and named after the traditional song "The Irish Rover" they are best known for the songs "The Unicorn", "Drunken Sailor", "Wasn't That a Party", "The Orange and the Green", "Whiskey on a Sunday", "Lily the Pink" and "The Black Velvet Band".

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