Songs of the Sea 2026 at Parade Plaza
(This event is part of the CT Maritime Heritage Festival)
Songs of the Sea 2026 at Parade Plaza brings six acts and four hours of sea songs, chanteys, Celtic music and folk punk to Parade Plaza in downtown New London on Saturday, September 12, as part of the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival.
The free, all-ages concert runs from 2 to 6:45 p.m. at Parade Plaza, at State and South Water streets, with performances scheduled in chronological order from None Of Us Saints, Littlefield & Morneault, Marc Bernier, Hold Fast, My Druthers and Canadian folk-punk band The Dreadnoughts.
There will also be vendors and food trucks around the concert.
This isn’t the genteel version of maritime music.
The organizers describe what they’ve been trying to create since around 2012 as a free concert of “maritime mayhem” in the middle of New England’s old Whaling City. The lineup deliberately puts veteran chanteymen who have spent decades preserving traditional work songs beside musicians who discovered that those same songs sound remarkably good when played with the attitude of punk rock.
And the progression of Saturday’s lineup tells that story particularly well.
2–2:30 p.m. — None Of Us Saints
None Of Us Saints opens Songs of the Sea at 2 p.m., starting the afternoon with a Connecticut group that draws from punk, Celtic folk and traditional sea-song culture.
Their recorded repertoire includes traditional Irish standards such as Seven Drunken Nights and Rocky Road to Dublin, immediately revealing where at least part of the group’s musical vocabulary comes from.
But this isn’t intended as museum-piece folk music.
The organizers describe None Of Us Saints as an assemblage of “punks, Celts, folksters and sea-songers,” which is a pretty good introduction to the larger philosophy behind Songs of the Sea.
Maritime music has survived in part because generations keep changing the way they perform it.
The sailors who originally sang work songs aboard commercial vessels weren’t preserving historic music. They were using songs as tools, entertainment and community. Centuries later, musicians can retain the choruses and stories while changing the instrumentation, tempo and attitude around them.
That’s the territory None Of Us Saints occupies as the first band of the afternoon.
Performance: 2–2:30 p.m.
2:45–3:15 p.m. — Littlefield & Morneault
The afternoon then reaches much deeper into New England’s maritime-music tradition with Littlefield & Morneault.
David Littlefield and Joseph Morneault perform ballads, maritime music and songs connected to local history, but both bring considerably more than a repertoire of old songs to the stage.
Littlefield worked for 24 years at Mystic Seaport Museum, where he served as a chanteyman and interpreter of historic vessels and exhibits.
He became particularly interested in the lives of ordinary sailors aboard American whaleships and conducted extensive research into the Charles W. Morgan, the last surviving wooden whaleship from the American whaling fleet.
Littlefield also spent 15 summers aboard the schooner Mystic Whaler performing maritime music.
And he was a member of Forebitter, the influential group of Mystic Seaport chanteymen whose recordings and performances helped carry traditional American maritime music well beyond southeastern Connecticut. Forebitter performed internationally, and Littlefield’s own maritime compositions have been performed by musicians in the United States and Europe.
His partner Joseph Morneault approaches the tradition as both musician and historian.
Morneault is a social historian and author specializing in the late 18th century and serves as president of the Maritime Music & Tradition Society, the organization behind the Connecticut Sea Music Festival in Essex.
He can also regularly be heard at the Griswold Inn’s long-running Monday night sea music gatherings in Essex.
Together, Littlefield & Morneault represent something important in the middle of a festival filled with punk musicians.
These are people who know where the songs came from.
Performance: 2:45–3:15 p.m.
3:30–4:05 p.m. — Marc Bernier
If southeastern Connecticut has an old guard of maritime musicians, Marc Bernier belongs firmly within it.
Bernier spent more than 30 years working at Mystic Seaport Museum, including five years as one of its chanteymen.
But his connection to maritime music didn’t end on a museum stage.
He’s worked as a musician and educator with the Clearwater program on the Hudson River and has actually gone to sea aboard traditional sailing vessels, working as a cook, deckhand and entertainer from Maine to the Chesapeake Bay.
That experience matters when singing chanteys.
A sea chantey wasn’t originally a song about sailing.
It was a song used while working aboard a ship.
Different chanteys were suited to different jobs. The rhythm helped sailors coordinate physical labor, whether hauling together on a line or performing other repetitive tasks that required a crew to move at the same moment.
A chanteyman led the song and the crew answered.
Bernier has spent decades studying and performing that tradition.
His repertoire extends well beyond sea music, however. He performs Irish tunes and songs, American folk music, pub and drinking songs and instrumental music, accompanying himself on guitar, mandolin and tenor banjo.
He’s also an accomplished percussionist who plays bodhrán in Irish music and frottior, or rubboard, with Cajun and Zydeco musicians.
Then there’s another Connecticut tradition in his background.
Bernier has been involved in the state’s fife-and-drum community since his teenage years and has performed as a fifer across North America and Europe.
At 3:30, Songs of the Sea essentially hands the microphone to someone whose life connects several of the musical traditions the festival is celebrating.
Performance: 3:30–4:05 p.m.
4:20–4:55 p.m. — Hold Fast
At 4:20, somebody turns up the volume.
Hold Fast comes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and takes traditional Irish music into Celtic-punk territory.
The band’s approach combines Irish traditional material with original songs, electric rock instrumentation and punk energy. Even when Hold Fast performs acoustically, speed and rhythm remain central to its sound.
Their repertoire provides a useful illustration of just how freely this musical world can cross boundaries.
Hold Fast has recorded a mashup of Rancid’s punk standard Ruby Soho and Sloop John B, a traditional song with roots extending back well before the Beach Boys made their version famous in 1966.
That combination might sound strange on paper.
At Songs of the Sea, it makes perfect sense.
Celtic punk has spent decades doing something very similar, taking traditional melodies, fiddles, whistles, drinking songs and historical ballads and putting them alongside distorted guitars and drums.
The Pogues helped establish the possibilities in the 1980s. Later bands pushed the combination in different directions.
Hold Fast carries that idea into the second half of Saturday’s concert.
After more than two hours rooted heavily in traditional sea music and folk, the afternoon starts moving toward punk.
Performance: 4:20–4:55 p.m.
5:10–5:45 p.m. — My Druthers
Then the festival gets very local.
My Druthers is a New London band led by Stuart Fensom, built as a rotating collective of musicians playing sea chanteys, maritime songs, Irish rebel music and working-class folk with punk-rock energy.
They are also one of the clearest examples of why Songs of the Sea belongs in New London.
Fensom comes from the punk scene, but the band treats traditional music less as a historical curiosity than as an earlier version of working-class music.
Songs about dangerous jobs, lousy bosses, drinking, rebellion, leaving home, missing home and dying far away from it aren’t exactly alien concepts to punk.
My Druthers simply shortens the distance between the traditions.
The rotating lineup can include guitar, fiddle, banjo and mandolin alongside multiple voices, and the group has appeared at punk shows, pubs, Celtic festivals, maritime gatherings and chantey events around New England.
Their 2025 debut album, Coming Up 3’s, was produced by Pete Steinkopf of The Bouncing Souls, providing another direct connection between New London’s sea-song scene and American punk.
My Druthers also keeps maritime music active locally rather than saving it for festival weekends. The group has hosted and appeared at sea-shanty nights at New London’s Oasis Pub, including performances with other regional traditional and maritime musicians.
The organizers affectionately describe them as New London’s “punks, drunks, stowaways, & shantymen.”
By 5:10 Saturday afternoon, that may require very little additional explanation.
Performance: 5:10–5:45 p.m.
6–6:45 p.m. — The Dreadnoughts
The final band takes the basic premise behind the entire afternoon and pushes it about as far as it can go.
The Dreadnoughts formed in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2006 and built an international following by combining street punk with sea chanteys, Celtic music, polka, klezmer and other European folk traditions.
It’s an improbable mixture until you hear it.
Then it becomes difficult to imagine why somebody hadn’t done it sooner.
The band traces its beginnings to Vancouver’s Ivanhoe Hotel and originally set out to combine traditional European folk music with punk. Over the following two decades, The Dreadnoughts toured internationally, playing hundreds of shows across roughly 30 countries.
They’ve released a catalog that demonstrates how seriously they take both halves of “folk punk.”
Polka’s Not Dead includes Randy Dandy-Oh alongside the band’s punked-up polkas and originals.
Foreign Skies is an ambitious concept album built around stories of the First World War, moving among chanteys, Balkan music, klezmer, polka and punk.
Into the North leaned heavily into nautical music.
Roll and Go continued the band’s relationship with traditional maritime song, and Green Willow returned to folk material through the group’s distinctly loud interpretation of it.
The band’s maritime work isn’t simply punk songs with pirate imagery attached.
The Dreadnoughts have spent years performing actual traditional nautical material, including songs such as Roll the Woodpile Down and Eliza Lee. Their original maritime songs have themselves begun moving through the folk community and being recorded by other sea-music performers.
More recently, with members relocating to New York, The Dreadnoughts developed an a cappella version of the group devoted specifically to traditional nautical music.
That makes them an unusually appropriate closer.
Saturday begins with Connecticut musicians mixing punk and folk, moves through performers directly connected to Mystic Seaport’s historic chantey tradition, turns toward Celtic punk and New London’s own maritime-punk scene, and finishes with a band that has carried essentially the same musical collision around the world.
Performance: 6–6:45 p.m.
Why Sea Chanteys Sound So Good With Punk Rock
There’s a reason so many of these musicians can move between maritime music and punk without the combination feeling forced.
Chanteys were communal music.
They generally weren’t intended to showcase a virtuoso singer while everyone else stood silently listening.
A leader called.
The crew responded.
The chorus belonged to everybody.
The music had to be rhythmic, memorable and loud enough to work in a difficult environment.
Strip away the historical distance and some of the underlying principles don’t sound terribly far removed from a crowded punk show.
Both traditions also contain plenty of songs about people on the margins of polite society.
Sailors, laborers, emigrants, soldiers, drinkers, prisoners, rebels and people trying to survive hard circumstances populate traditional folk music.
Punk simply arrived later with electric guitars.
Songs of the Sea puts both traditions on the same stage.
New London Is More Than a Convenient Backdrop
Calling New London the Whaling City isn’t a modern marketing invention.
The city’s maritime history stretches across centuries of commercial shipping, whaling, naval activity, fishing and shipbuilding. During the 19th century, New London developed into one of America’s important whaling ports.
The Thames River remains central to the region’s maritime identity today.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy sits upriver in New London. Naval Submarine Base New London is across the river in Groton. The historic ship Nautilus and Submarine Force Museum sit farther north, while ferries, commercial vessels, Coast Guard ships, recreational boats and submarines continue moving through the river.
That makes Parade Plaza an appropriate place to sing songs originally created by people whose lives revolved around ships.
It’s also why Songs of the Sea fits so naturally into the larger Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival taking place across New London’s waterfront Saturday and Sunday.
One Concert Inside a Much Larger Maritime Weekend
Songs of the Sea occupies the afternoon, but the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival begins hours earlier.
Saturday’s official festival schedule starts at 10 a.m. with an opening ceremony and a presentation marking the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy with a new commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp.
Throughout the day, visitors can tour vessels, visit vendors, explore children’s activities and use free transportation connecting festival locations around the harbor.
Free hop-on/hop-off harbor cruises run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., connecting Fort Trumbull, City Pier, the Nautilus area and Groton.
Other Saturday activities include a children’s Mermaid & Privateer Walking Parade at 11:30 a.m., a noon kids’ sing-along, a Coast Guard search-and-rescue helicopter demonstration at 1:30 p.m. and other music and programming around the waterfront.
The festival then continues after Songs of the Sea finishes.
At 7:30 p.m., the March of the Traitor begins on Bank Street as Flock Theatre revives New London’s tradition of burning Benedict Arnold in effigy. The procession leads toward Waterfront Park, where the burning is scheduled from 8 to 8:15 p.m.
A 300-drone light show over the Thames River follows at approximately 8:15 p.m.
The festival returns Sunday with another full day of vessel tours, maritime programming, a children’s fishing clinic, Discovering Amistad programs and the Navy-versus-Coast Guard Sea-Service Showdown.
Songs That Once Worked Ships Now Build Community
There is a nice bit of continuity in what Songs of the Sea is trying to accomplish.
The original chanteys existed partly because a group of people needed to act together.
One person sang a line.
Everyone answered.
The song turned individuals into a crew, at least for the duration of the work.
Saturday’s organizers are explicit that community remains part of the point.
They’ve envisioned a free, all-ages maritime concert in downtown New London since around 2012. The emphasis isn’t on exclusivity or musical purity. Veteran chanteymen share a bill with punk musicians. Traditional songs coexist with electric guitars. People who know every chorus can sing beside people hearing a sea chantey for the first time.
And admission costs nothing.
In a city whose identity has been tied to the sea for centuries, that may be a more authentic way to keep maritime music alive than treating it as something that ended when the last commercial sailing ships disappeared.
At 2 p.m., None Of Us Saints starts the music.
By 6 p.m., one of the world’s better-known folk-punk bands takes over.
In between, several generations of New England’s maritime-music tradition get 30 or 35 minutes apiece to demonstrate that sea songs aren’t finished yet.
Details
Event: Songs of the Sea 2026
Festival: Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival
Date: Saturday, September 12, 2026
Concert Time: 2–6:45 p.m.
Location: Parade Plaza
Intersection: State Street and South Water Street, New London, CT
Admission: Free
Ages: All ages
Setting: Outdoor concert in downtown New London
Food: Food truck options are planned
Vendors: A selection of vendors will be on site
Performance Schedule:
2–2:30 p.m. — None Of Us Saints
2:45–3:15 p.m. — Littlefield & Morneault
3:30–4:05 p.m. — Marc Bernier
4:20–4:55 p.m. — Hold Fast
5:10–5:45 p.m. — My Druthers
6–6:45 p.m. — The Dreadnoughts
Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival: September 12–13 at New London Waterfront Park, Fort Trumbull State Park and other downtown/waterfront locations
Festival Hours Saturday: Main daytime activities begin at 10 a.m.; evening programming continues until approximately 8:30 p.m.
Transportation: Free festival shuttle service and hop-on/hop-off harbor transportation connect festival locations during the day
Saturday Evening: March of the Traitor at 7:30 p.m.; Burning of Benedict Arnold from approximately 8–8:15 p.m.; 300-drone light show follows over the Thames River
Parking: Festival organizers recommend downtown Water Street garages or street parking near Fort Trumbull, then using free festival transportation between locations
More information is available at the Event Website links below.
Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.