Records of work songs are as old as historical records, and
anthropological evidence suggests that most
agrarian societies tend to have them. Norm Cohen divided collected work songs into the following categories: domestic, agricultural or pastoral,
sea shanties, African-American work songs, songs and chants of direction, and
street cries.
Ted Gioia built on these categories by dividing agricultural and pastoral songs into subsections: hunting, cultivation and herding songs. Gioia also highlighted the industrial or proto-industrial songs of
cloth workers (see
Waulking song),
factory workers,
seamen,
longshoremen,
mechanics,
plumbers,
electricians,
lumberjacks,
cowboys and
miners. He also added
prisoner songs and modern work songs.
Hunting and pastoral songs In societies without mechanical
timekeeping, songs for mobilisation–calling members of a community together for a collective task–were extremely important. Rhythms of work songs, similar to an African drum beat, served to synchronize physical movement in groups, coordinating sowing, hoeing, and harvesting. Music researchers pointed out that these songs highlighted how people spoke, the gender roles, and how workers migrated to different parts of the world.
African-American work songs picking cotton in the United States, 1840. 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.
Slave Songs of the United States was the first collection of African-American "slave songs". It was published in 1867 by
William Francis Allen,
Charles Pickard Ware, and
Lucy McKim Garrison. Though this text included many songs by slaves, other texts have also been published that include work songs. Many songs sung by slaves have their origins in African song traditions, and may have been sung to remind the Africans of home, while others were instituted by the captors to raise morale and keep Africans working in rhythm. They have also been seen as a means of withstanding hardship and expressing anger and frustration through creativity or covert verbal opposition. Similarly, work songs have been used as a form of rebellion and resistance. Specifically,
African-American women work songs have a particular history and center on resistance and self-care. Work songs helped to pass down information about the lived experience of enslaved people to their communities and families. The leader's part might overlap with the response, thus creating a unique collaborative sound. Similarly, African-American folk and traditional music focuses on
polyphony rather than a melody with a harmony. In early African captivity drums were used to provide rhythm, but they were banned in later years because of the fear that Africans would use them to communicate in a rebellion; nevertheless, Africans managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies. In the 1950s, there are very few examples of work songs linked to cotton picking. Corn, however, was a very common subject of work songs on a typical plantation. Because the crop was the main component of most Africans' diet, they would often sing about it regardless of whether it was being harvested. Often, communities in the south would hold "corn-shucking jubilees", during which an entire community of planters would gather on one plantation. The planters would bring their harvests, as well as their enslaved workers, and work such as shucking corn, rolling logs, or threshing rice would be done, accompanied by the singing of Africans doing work. The following is an example of a song Africans would sing as they approached one of these festivals. It is from ex bonded African
William Wells Brown's memoir " My Southern Home". {{quote|These long, mournful, antiphonal songs accompanied the work on cotton plantations, under the driver's lash.|
Tony Palmer,
All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music. Another common type of African-American work song was the "boat song". Sung by slaves who had the job of rowing, this type of work song is characterized by "plaintive, melancholy singing." These songs were not somber because the work was more troublesome than the work of harvesting crops. Rather, they were low-spirited so that they could maintain the slow, steady tempo needed for rowing. In this way, work songs followed the African tradition, emphasizing the importance of activities being accompanied by the appropriate song. The historian
Sylviane Diouf and
ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify
Islamic music as an influence on field holler music. Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the
Islamic call to prayer (originating from
Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous
Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century
field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal cords, dramatic changes in
musical scales, and nasal
intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to
African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using
melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of
West Africa that had been in contact with the
Arabic-
Islamic world of the
Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." 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.
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. 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. 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 rise of 'Chansons Industriale' among cloth workers in the early nineteenth century, and in the USA where industrialisation expanded rapidly after the
Civil War.
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...'.
Folk revival In the 1930s,
Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) was recorded in prison by the folklorist
Alan Lomax. Lead Belly knew hundreds of work hollers and traditional songs from the cotton fields, railroads and prison gangs. In the 1940s he toured widely on college campuses and folk music venues, popularising songs including "Take This Hammer", "John Henry" "Boll Weevil" and "Midnight Special". His repertoire was a major influence on the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Mining songs written in the late 1940s by country artists
Merle Travis ("Sixteen Tons" and "
Dark as a Dungeon") and
Billy Edd Wheeler ("Coal Tattoo") also became fireside standards. The working class was glorified in
Marxist theory and practice, and a strong link between work songs and activism developed in the USA and elsewhere. The "dustbowl balladeer"
Woody Guthrie wrote and performed work-related songs such as "
Deportee" and "Talking Hard Work" in the 1940s and 1950s. Guthrie and other politically active performers, especially
the Weavers with
Pete Seeger, continued the Union Songs movement that had begun with
Joe Hill in the early 1900s. From that time, most topical and activist singers including
Joan Baez,
Bob Dylan and
Phil Ochs performed work-related songs. Rock performers with working-class leanings such as
Bruce Springsteen have also been influenced by the genre. In Britain,
Ewan MacColl and
Peggy Seeger produced hundreds of albums of political and traditional songs, writing many songs referring to industrial and working conditions. Folk or folk-rock performers including
Steeleye Span,
Fairport Convention,
The Watersons,
Dick Gaughan,
Capercaillie,
Billy Bragg,
James Fagan and
Nancy Kerr have featured work songs in their performances. In Australia, shearing songs and droving songs featured strongly in the first traditional songs to be collected in the field in the 1950s. Merv Lilley and
Dorothy Hewett wrote work poems that were set to music during the early 1960s folk revival and became standards, such as the call-and-reply canecutting song "Cane Killed Abel" and one of the first songs about the social and environmental damage caused by industrialisation, "Weevils in the Flour". Alternative rock bands like
Midnight Oil and
Goanna passed the tradition to a broader audience. With the end of the folk boom in the 1970s and the rise of the introspective singer-songwriter, the genre lost its wide public appeal, but work songs have continued to be very popular throughout the folk scene, at protest gatherings and with union choirs.
Women's work songs Waulking songs from Scotland are a traditional genre performed while women communally beat and felted cloth. Lacemakers in the
English East Midlands,
Flanders, and
Saxony chanted lace tells—catchy rhymes about lace manufacture and morbid subjects—to the rhythm of their work. The surviving corpus of English lace tells make up a substantial proportion of surviving English women's work songs. Some women's work songs have been created within modern genres. There are several women's songs titled "
9 to 5".
Cher's "Working Girl" is also an office work anthem.
Donna Summer's "
She Works Hard for the Money" is disco/techno and refers to the working class and middle class women. ==See also==