work song

A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a specific form of work, either sung while conducting a task (often to coordinate timing) or a song linked to a task or trade which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song.

Definitions and categories

Records of work songs are roughly as old as historical records, and anthropological evidence suggests that all agrarian societies tend to have them.^[1] Most modern commentators on work songs have included both songs sung while working as well as songs about work, since the two categories are seen as interconnected.^[2] Norm Cohen divided collected work songs into domestic, agricultural or pastoral, sea shanties, African American (gang) worksongs, songs and chants of direction, and street cries.^[3] Ted Gioia further divided agricultural and pastorals songs into hunting, cultivation and herding songs, and highlighted the industrial or proto-industrial songs of: cloth workers, factory workers, seamen, lumberjacks, cowboys and miners. He also added prisoner songs and modern work songs.^[1]

Hunting and pastoral songs

In societies without mechanical time keeping, songs of mobilisation, calling members of a community together for a collective task, were extremely important.^[4] Both hunting and the keeping of livestock tended to involve small groups or individuals, usually boys and young men, away from the centres of settlement and with long hours to pass. As a result it had been noted that tended to produce long narrative songs, often sung individually, which might dwell on the themes of pastoral activity or animals, designed to pass the time in the tedium of work.^[4] Hunting songs, like those of the Mbuti of the Congo, often incorporated distinctive whistles and yodels so that hunters could identity each others locations and those of their prey.^[4]

Agricultural work songs

Most agricultural work songs are rhythmic a cappella songs sung by people working on a physical and often repetitive task. The songs were probably intended to increase productivity while reducing feelings of boredom.^[4] Rhythms of work songs can serve to synchronize physical movement in a group or gang, as they are in parts of Africa with drums as accompaniment to coordinate sowing and hoeing.^[4] Frequently, the usage of verses in work songs are often improvised and sung differently each time. The improvisation provided the singers with a sometimes subversive form of expression: improvised verses sung by slaves had verses about escaping; improvised verses sung by sailors had verses complaining about the captain and the work conditions. Work songs also help to create a feeling of familiarity and connection between the workers.

African American work songs

African American work songs originally developed in the era of slavery, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Because they were part of an almost entirely oral culture they had no fixed form and only began to be recorded as the era of slavery came to an end after 1865. The first collection of African American 'slave songs' was published in 1867 by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison.^[5] Many had their origins in African song traditions, and may have been sung to remind the slaves of home, while others were instituted by the slave masters to raise morale and keep slaves working in rhythm.^[6] They have also been seen as a means of withstanding hardship and expressing anger and frustration through creativity or covert verbal opposition.^[7]

A common feature of African American songs was the call-and-response format, where a leader would sing a verse or verses and the others would respond with a chorus. This came from African traditions of agricultural work song and found its way into the spirituals that developed once slaves began to convert to Christianity and from there to both gospel music and the blues. Also evident were field hollers, shouts, and moans, which may have been originally designed for different bands or individuals to locate each other and narrative songs that used folk tales and folk motifs, often making use of homemade instruments.^[8] In early slavery drums were used to provide rhythm, but they were banned in later years because of the fear that black slaves would use them to communicate in a rebellion, nevertheless slaves managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies.^[9] Perhaps surprisingly, there are very few examples of work songs linked to cotton picking.^[10]

Sea shanties

Work songs sung by sailors between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries are known as sea shanties. These songs were typically performed while adjusting the rigging, raising anchor, and other tasks where men would need to pull in rhythm. These songs usually have a very punctuated rhythm precisely for this reason, along with a call-and-answer format. Well before the nineteenth century, sea songs were common on rowing vessels. Such songs were also very rhythmic in order to keep the rowers together. Because many cultures used slaves to row, these songs might also be considered slave songs. These songs were performed with and without the aid of a drum.

Cowboy songs

Western music was directly influenced by the folk music traditions of immigrants in the nineteenth century as they moved west. They reflecting the realities of the range and ranch houses where the music originated, played a major part in combating the loneliness and boredom that characterised cowboy life and western life in general.^[11] Such songs were often accompanied on mobile instruments of guitars, fiddles, concertina and harmonica.^[11] In the nineteenth century cowboy bands developed and cowboy songs began to be collected and published from the early twentieth century with books like John Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910).^[12] As cowboys were romanticised in the mid-twentieth century they became extremely popular and played a part in the development of country and western music.^[11]

Industrial folk song

Industrial folk song emerged in Britain in the eighteenth century, as workers took the forms of music with which they were familiar, including ballads and agricultural work songs, and adapted them to their new experiences and circumstances.^[13] Unlike agricultural work songs, it was often unnecessary to use music to synchronise actions between workers, as the pace would be increasingly determined by water, steam, chemical and eventually electric power, and frequently impossible because of the noise of early industry.^[14] As a result, industrial folk songs tended to be descriptive of work, circumstances, or political in nature, making them amongst the earliest protest songs and were sung between work shifts or in leisure hours, rather than during work. This pattern can be seen in textile production, mining and eventually steel, shipbuilding, rail working and other industries. As other nations industrialised their folk song underwent a similar process of change, as can be seen for example in France, where Saint-Simon noted the as the rise of 'Chansons Industriale' among cloth workers in the early nineteenth century, and in the USA where industrialisation expanded rapidly after the Civil War.^[15] A.L. Lloyd defined the industrial work song as 'the kind of vernacular songs made by workers themselves directly out of their own experiences, expressing their own interest and aspirations...'.^[13] Lloyd also pointed to various types of song, including chants of labour, love and erotic occupational songs and industrial protest songs, which included narratives of disasters (particularly among miners), laments for conditions, as well as overtly political strike ballads.^[13] He also noted the existence of songs about heroic and mythical figures of industrial work, like the coal miners the 'Big Hewer' or 'Big Isaac' Lewis.^[13] This tendency was even more marked in early American industrial songs, where representative heroes like Casey Jones and John Henry were eulogised in blues ballads from the nineteenth century.^[16] Industrial folk songs were largely ignored by early folk song collectors, but gained attention in the second folk revival in the twentieth century, being noted and recorded by figures such as George Korson, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the USA and A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in Britain.^[17] The genre declined in popularity with new forms of music and de-industrialisation in the twentieth century, but has continued to influence performers like Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen.^[18]

See also

• Military cadence
• Waulking song
• Venezuelan work songs
• The Volga Boatmen's Song

Notes

External links

Leadbelly's rendition of Pick A Bail Of Cotton.