David Coffin
Thunderous maritime folk and early music played on archaic winds. Booming baritone vocals that turn every room into a salt-stained wooden ship.
Thunderous maritime folk and early music played on archaic winds. Booming baritone vocals that turn every room into a salt-stained wooden ship.
Listening to David Coffin is like being pulled into a living history of the Atlantic. His music is defined by a massive, room-filling bass-baritone that carries the weight of centuries of maritime tradition. It is communal, loud, and unapologetically physical, often centered around the rhythmic demands of sea shanties and the haunting melodies of early European wind instruments.
What truly sets Coffin apart is his mastery of 'hot air' instruments, ranging from the familiar recorder to the obscure, buzzing tones of the shawm and gemshorn. He doesn't just perform songs; he leads them, acting as a bridge between the scholarly world of early music and the rowdy, participatory energy of a dockside singalong. The sound is raw and acoustic, favoring the natural resonance of wooden instruments and human lungs over studio polish.
Start with his viral rendition of 'Roll the Old Chariot' to hear his ability to command a crowd, then move to 'The Nantucket Sleighride' for a deeper dive into the whaling lore that is literally in his bloodline. It is the perfect soundtrack for anyone who finds beauty in the intersection of salt water, history, and the power of the collective human voice.
David Coffin is an American traditional folk musician specializing in early music and maritime music, based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States. He is the song leader for the Revels music programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also presents music enrichment programs for schools throughout New England. One program is based on the history of the recorder, and the other is called Life at Sea: A Voyage in Song. Coffin has a bass-baritone voice and plays various types of concertinas, recorders, and whistles, in addition to archaic instruments like the shawm, rackett, or gemshorn. He comes from a musical background: his father, Reverend William Sloane Coffin, studied to be a concert pianist with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, his grandfather was pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and his great-grandfather was Polish conductor Emil Młynarski. One of his ancestors was Tristram Coffin, an early English settler in Massachusetts and prominent part of the whaling industry of the 1600s who bought Nantucket Island in 1659 for thirty pounds and two beaver hats. He leads several sea shanties, including the title song, onscreen in the 2019 Maine-set film Blow the Man Down. In 2010, Coffin posted to YouTube a version of "Roll the Old Chariot" recorded at that year's Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, featuring him leading a crowd singing the song. It has over six million views as of December 2025.
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