The 'Sloop John B' story is a folktale from the harbors of Nassau. The Beach Boys made this story their own, made a new body to hold the heart of this song.
The story is a folktale from the harbors of Nassau. The Beach Boys made this story their own, made a new body to hold the heart of this song.
I think covering a song is an act of transition, of making the body you know is there but cannot yet see.is Paste’s two-week celebration of the Beach Boys’ eleventh album, which turns sixty years old on May 16, 2026. I can hear the water lapping against the shore, the anchor creaking against the tug of the slow nocturnal wake, the fire whispering warm secrets to its sylvan sidekick, the guitar tuning to cowboy chords, the voices humming harmony lines.
Reaching for the high part with my young, fishy voice. Maybe stay on the third, it’s what you know best. Anyone need a beer? Are we saying break up or broke up this time?
Does everyone have the lyrics? It is summer, and I am young. So are you. You are in northern Michigan with me, in my memory, and we are living in a small cottage on a small lake with my family.
It is a place where I’ve lived from June to September since I was born, and a place where my mom grew up doing the same. Nothing to do except finish the summer reading and go to bonfires at the neighbor’s cottage. We have a couple neighbors—consider them family, we have grown up with them since our parents’ parents were young—but only one has bonfires.
If we’re lucky, they’ll pull out the weathered songbooks and a guitar or two, and we’ll sing songs, a couple of us from each family on the private dirt road blending voices in the near-dark twilight. We sing songs from the 60s and 70s, the folk and pop hits. Big choruses and easy verses, whatever harmony comes out of your mouth.
It’s not hard to catch the melody with everyone singing along, or you can just listen, sip your drink, and close your eyes. so the opposite must be true. You know what I mean? Answers like this were desirable when I was a kid. I chased after them with all my young, foolhardy speed.
I believed in things that made sense because they were the correct shape, but when I gathered all the pieces and finished the puzzle, my body looked all wrong. I needed answers, even when they were preposterous, because things about my body and brain weren’t making sense. In fact, there was no room for uncertainty. It was impossible to make a mistake.
I hadn’t yet known coincidence to be one of the mundane realities of living, one of the basic magics of our quotidian lives; I still believed it to be fantastical, otherworldly, divine. What else could you call it? I was a John B singing “Sloop John B.” I was the eponymous craft, singing my song. My body.
We pick the song and everyone looks at me. More than anything, I love singing the chorus when everyone hoists up my sails and sees how my mainsail sets. This is when I get to go home. Most of these singing neighbors were small boat sailors, the half-mile stretch of beach littered with Sunfishes.
My mom sailed all year round, not just with a Sunfish or the more commanding and demanding Lightning that she sailed on our small Michigan lake in the summer, but in the Boston Harbor and with a group of New England sailors who called themselves the Power Squadron. They would plan small midwinter trips, harbor-hopping up and down the Atlantic coast, from Massachusetts to Maine. I accompanied her on a few of these voyages.
Once we dropped anchor and secured everything for the evening, they’d cook and talk. Sometimes there’d be a guitar and we’d sing some songs, or we’d play Rummy 500, or I’d do my homework and play my Gameboy. I am my mother’s daughter and I find it most apparent when I am on a boat. The ropes and finding the balance of my body make sense in that coincidental, ancestral way.
I know my mom best as a woman of the water. The water is her road, the water is her world. The water is where all of our homes are. When I imagine her home, it’s a house on the water.
A boat tied to the dock. Sunfish pulled up on skids on the shore. Dinghy on the grass, drying in the sun. Her home is a wind in the sails.
When she wants to go home, she stays on the sloop. For the first twenty-seven years of my life, I was Sloop John B and all I wanted to do was go home. I was a girl lost at sea with everyone looking for the boy. The more I hid the girl, the harder it was to go home.
The home inside my head felt unsafe, unstable, uncertain. Boat sailing round the harbors of my mind, looking for a place to drop anchor, play cards, and sing songs. So many years singing the verses of “Sloop John B,” existing in the conflicts, weathering the hardships of living with a thing I did not want. A body that did not feel like my body, a heart that was not my heart.
Living in the truth of my queerness, of my womanhood, has introduced me to a legacy of sailors, and by sailors I mean queers, who have left one or many homes to discover what else is possible. Home in motion, home in our own hearts. People who are exploring, who are pursuing their curiosity. People who find a song and consider the story it tells, how it could be saying something about themselves, too.
The story of “Sloop John B” is a folktale from the harbors of Nassau. So, again, there’s a transformation, an alchemy in the music-making. The Beach Boys made this story their own, made a new body to hold the heart of this song. I think covering a song is an act of transition, of making the body you know is there but cannot yet see.
Letting curiosity become magic, letting magic become me and mine. How else could a boy know she was a girl, without curiosity, without magic? My body became a very frightening place because I was afraid to pay attention to it. Afraid to discover that the answer was not simple, no, no, it never is.
Living asks a lot of you, all the time. With that said, I do not want to spend any more of my time in this life afraid than I already have. Let the girl sing the high harmony this time, she’s been practicing. Let the girl be the girl.
Different name, same tune. Her home is in that harmony, in that song:Count it off—Imogen Bergin is an artist living in northern Michigan. She writes and produces music under her own name and is the bassist in Sasha and the Valentines.
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