The Maritime Music Directory International (MMDI) is a web portal where you can connect with maritime-themed musical acts and the places at which they perform.
The internet has gotten so crowded today that the big search engines can’t keep up with it. They limit what they index, making it harder to find a lot of websites. We designed the MMDI to be easy to find, and we link “sea shanty” related websites here so fans, scholars and the press can quickly connect to the mariners’ music that we all love. We’re doing this all for free; no memberships are required to access this directory.
Here is what you’ll discover:
- Locations that you can go to hear maritime music, which include everything from multi-performer festivals to single-group concerts to local sing-outs and house concerts
- Maritime-themed musical groups and solo performers, including both professional and non-professional groups such as shantychors or choirs
- Members of maritime-themed bands: a list of the individuals contributing to the maritime music genre, past or future, that are members of a musical performance group (see above)
- Maritime-themed musical recordings, past or future, as associated with either the maritime-themed venues, or maritime-themed musical performers as cited above. This is a hyperlinked list of names of the recordings that allows visitors to the MMDI to follow the links off of the site to purchase this music elsewhere
These listings are thoroughly cross-linked to each other so that venues can indicate which music group performed at their event, for instance; or, what music groups an individual was a part of. The purpose of this is to allow musical scholars, sea shanty fans, and the press to have greater access to the genre and its history as a whole.
About The MMDI Crew
Dean Calin observed that the “sea shanty” craze that swept the world during the Covid pandemic was doing a great disservice to the hundreds of existing groups whose mission it was to perform and preserve this kind of music. Only about a dozen musicians were receiving attention in this genre, and of those, a third of them had no prior experience with this music at all! Along with a career in sales and marketing, as well as over two decades of performing professionally as a maritime musician, Calin began the MMDI project to develop a user-populated data source for the genre – a free reference for everyone to discover the excitement and popularity of mariners’ music.
Tony Goodenough has joined the MMDI team as our UK Editor. Tony has been an instrumental part of the maritime music scene for many years. He was a member of the famous maritime music group, The Shanty Crew, from about 1980 through 1995. His ubiquitous song, “Pump Shanty”, has been performed all around the world and has very often been misidentified as a “traditional” sea shanty! Tony speaks French fluently and he has dramatically increased the number of MMDI listings in both France and the UK.
Gunnar Wiegand has joined the MMDI team as our Germany Editor. He has been performing maritime and folk music from his Salzhemmendorf home town for over 40 years. In addition to being a successful musical entertainer, he has proven to be a skilled communicator and researcher for our efforts to uncover lost or hidden musical acts and festivals. We are very happy for him to work with us on our project!
David HB Drake (www.davidhbdrake.com) is a life-long folk singer, songwriter and sailor based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He directs Organic Arts, a not-for-profit organization, for the benefit of local performance artists. As a coordinating entity, Organic Arts acted as MMDI’s fiscal receiver for grants and sponsorships before the MMDI incorporated independently in late 2024. As a maritime music performer himself, Drake understood the synergistic value of working together with the MMDI. Organic Arts provided the MMDI the organization and support needed to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the creation of the database-driven directory. Drake is now a board member and treasurer for the the Maritime Music Directory International, Ltd.
Danielle Noble has joined the project to help us along with tutorials for the musical acts and venues in getting their listings posted and updated.
Our database specialist, Andrew Janke, joined the team with the intention to solve the many-to-many links required for venues to and from musical acts, and musical acts to and from their band members. Andrew is a music aficionado from Chicago who moved to New York because it is the hub of fun. It is also where he develops analytics and trading platforms for the finance industry. His schedule has opened up to move forward with these projects.
Our researcher, Jon Peterson, is a maritime-themed musician, an historical reenactor and an environmental theater performer with years of familiarity with the genre. Jon has moved on to other activities.
William Xu is a skilled freelancer whose day-job as a Web Application Developer & Systems Analyst at The Los Angeles Film School allows him the opportunity to contract with us to move the MMDI toward completion.
Jean-François Blais, creator and animator of “Bordel de Mer – the sea shanties podcast” imported the Mark I MMDI into the Mark II WordPress configuration around July 1, 2022. He had to step away from the project for health reasons. He continues to perform with the popular, Quebecois shanty band, Brise-Glace.
Justin Marcinkus hand-coded the original Mark I version of the MMDI. He has moved on to other projects.
Kurt Niedrauer contributed extensively to the data input for both the Mark I and Mark II versions of this web site.
The Maritime Music Directory International, Ltd is a registered 501(c)(3) educational, non-profit and tax exempt organization, based in Racine, Wisconsin. You can donate to the MMDI here.