A song performed by an individual or a group at work to relieve the tedium, express
thoughts or emotions, or facilitate the task by coordinating actions or movements;
conversely, such performances are sometimes addressed not to the workers alone but to
potential customers (as in auctioneers’ chants or street vendors’ cries), to draft animals or
livestock (as in mule skinners’ calls or cowboys’ night-herding songs), even to
supernatural forces or beings deemed capable of hindering or helping in a task’s
completion (as in the butter charms for hastening the milk’s turning). While many such
songs may be identified by content alone, it is this work context that most fundamentally
defines worksong, distinguishing it from “occupational song,” which simply describes or
derives from work processes or occupations or trades, or “labor song,” associated with
labor unions, their ideologies, and the pursuit of their goals and agendas. Admittedly,
there is, as one would expect, considerable overlap among these categories, so that a
given item might at different times fall under any one or all three headings. Moreover,
songs of quite various origin whose contents evince no relation whatsoever to laboring
are frequently performed by persons at work. Again, then, the laboring context is the
ultimate determinant of worksong status, even if folklorists have concentrated on
materials whose contents overtly reflect this function—understandably so, since so much
of our evidence dates from an earlier time when folksong collectors were less concerned
with contexts than texts.
Worksongs are relatively rare among Native Americans, with some notable
exceptions, such as the corn-grinding songs of the Navajo and Pueblos or the paddle songs found among some tribes in the Pacific Northwest. On the whole, however, this
practice is best documented among Americans of African or European descent. (Given
the importance of worksongs in Asia, one might anticipate their prevalence among Asian
Americans, but documentation is in this case, unfortunately, lacking. So, for example,
while railroad workers have been an especially rich source of worksongs, none seem to
have been collected from the Chinese employed in building the Central Pacific during the
late 19th century.)
Not surprisingly, the best-documented worksongs among American Whites are
English-language performances often derived from the Anglo-Celtic traditions of Great
Britain and Ireland. While there is considerable evidence of such singing among other
European American groups, these traditions appear generally consistent in type, content,
and context with the more extensively noted English-language examples.
Like their transatlantic counterparts, Anglo American women have sung at various
tasks—washing, weaving, spinning, milking, and churning—in many instances the same
or similar items as their British and Irish compatriots, such as, the ubiquitous “Come,
Butter, Come.” Outside the domestic context, the shearing songs occasionally collected in
the United States perpetuate the rich pastoral traditions of the Old World, where
shepherds have been a source not merely of worksongs, but also of a large body of
instrumental music (typically played on pipes, flutes, or whistles) fulfilling a similar
function. While American pastoralists have produced no comparable instrumental
traditions, the songs of the cowboy do provide a uniquely American parallel to the
repertoire of European shepherds. The trail-driving songs intended to pace a herd’s
progress while relieving the monotony of that arduous process often reveal themseives
not only through their descriptions of life in the cattle camp or on the trail, but also by
their jogging gait and the nonsense refrains built around the yips, hoops, and hollers with
which the cowhands drove and directed the cattle; like many, “The Old Chisum Trail” is
composed of floating stanzas that can be extended almost indefinitely:
Oh come along, boys, and listen to my tale,
I’ll tell you my troubles on the old Chisum trail.
Come a-ti yi youpy youpy ya youpy ya,
Come a-ti yi youpy youpy ya.
However, the largest body of cowboy worksongs were the lullaby-like night-herding
songs, ostensibly employed to calm the bedded-down herd, more likely (at least in greater
part) inspired by the boredom or loneliness of the rider on watch. Like many worksongs,
night-herding songs appear to have been drawn mainly from existing traditions, Western
or otherwise (thus, one commonly finds popular items such as ‘I’ll Remember Your Love
in My Prayers,” a 19th-century “hit” by Tin Pan Alley composer William Shakespeare
Hays, traditionally sung as night-herding songs), though a few items—for example,
“Doney Gal,” or “Lay Down, Little Dogies”—may have originated in this context.
Given the available documentation, however, the most vigorous traditions of
American worksong are without question those of African Americans. Partly an
inheritance from Africa, where worksongs are especially prominent, often even closely
resembling, in content and context, those of New World Blacks, pardy a reflection of social and economic conditions in the Americas, the extensive African American
worksong repertoire encompasses a myriad of subtypes, most conveniently divided
between individual and gang songs. The former are epitomized by the “field hollers”
(sometimes particularized as “cornfield” or “cotton fleld” hollers) or “arhoolies”—an
onomatopoeic term evoking these mournful, almost ethereal performances—in some
regions also called “whooping” or “loud mouthing.” Although field hollers defy neat
characterization or transcription, they are typified by relaxed meters (or even a seeming
total lack thereof), irregular intervals or microtonality (that is, pitches falling between the
standard half-steps of Western art music), and an especially high degree of improvisation
and ornamentation, including glissandi and “bends,” slides between notes or shifts in
register suggestive of yodeling, quavers or sudden changes in dynamics, and so forth.
Frequently wordless, the holler’s verbal components, when present, may alternate
between traditional commonplaces and the momentary thoughts or feelings of the worker.
The following text from Alabama typifies such performances, simultaneously obscuring
their usual vocal embellishments:
Ay-oh-hoh!
I’m goin’ up the river!
Oh, couldn’t stay here!
For I’m goin’ home!
Though sometimes directed toward others, as in the various calls addressed to
“waterboys,” “bossmen,” plough horses or mules, field hollers are primarily vehicles of
self-expression. Black gang songs, on the other hand, coordinate the movements of
groups at work, at one time or another documented for virtually any activity—hoeing and
harvesting, tree cutting, rail laying and tie tamping, rowing, lifting, and loading—
requiring work gangs. In many African worksongs, as in much if not most African and
African American vocal music per se, such pieces invariably assume an antiphonal (calland-response) structure, linking the vocal interplay between leader and chorus to the
rhythms of work, which may themselves become part of the song “texts,” manifested in
the ringing of hammers, the falling of hoes, the chopping of axes, the stroke of oars, and
the like. Workers may also conspicuously draw and expel breath to the beat of the song
or rhythmically punctuate the performance with grunts of exertion. Typical is the
following from a group of Mississippi convicts “chopping out” weeds (the italicized
words coincide with the beat of their hoes):
Leader: I’ll be so glad when
Group: Uh huh!
Leader: the sun goes down.
Group: When the sun goes down.
Leader: I’ll be so glad when
Group: Uh huh!
Leader: the sun goes down.
Group: When the sun goes down.
Leader: I ain’t all that sleepy but
Group: Uh huh!
Leader: I want to lie down.
Group: But I want to lie down.
Leader: I ain’t all that sleepy but
Group: Uh huh!
Leader: I want to lie down.
Group: But I want to lie down.
Even more than field hollers, Black gang songs are often, as in the foregoing example,
vehicles of social protest or personal complaint, reflecting the oppressive or exploitative
conditions with which African American workers have so often contended.
Ironically, the sea chantey, conventionally viewed as the quintessential Anglo-Celtic
worksong type, may be largely a borrowing from Black tradition, a debt partly revealed
by its identical coordination of group movements through antiphonal singing. In the
following excerpt from a “short-haul” chantey, noted at Staten Island in the 1930s, the
gang would heave together on the rope at the word “haul” ending each refrain:
Haul the bowline, the long-tailed bowline,
Refrain: Haul the bowline, the bowline haul.
Haul the bowline, Kitty, oh, my darling,
Refrain: Haul the bowline, the bowline haul.
Haul the bowline, we’ll haul and haul together,
Refrain: Haul the bowline, the bowline haul.
While collectors of American maritime traditions have overwhelmingly concentrated on
White singers, chanteying appears to have been every bit as common among African
American seamen and dock workers. And although it has been suggested, such traditions
may have been current among European sailors as early as the 15th century (the evidence
is inconclusive), the sea chantey is indisputably best documented in 19th-century
America, by which time Black and White crews had for centuries labored together along
the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts and in the West Indies. Given the extreme rarity of such
antiphonal worksongs in European and other European American traditions, coupled with
their virtual universality among African and African American groups, it seems most
likely that this custom is largely a Black innovation, even if many or perhaps most of the
particular items in the chantying repertoire were created by Whites. (In fact, a 15thcentury origin for the sea chanty would by no means disprove this hypothesis, since this
in itself might simply reflect the well-documented interactions of Black and White crews
along the West African Coast during this era.)
While most of the preceding examples derive from agrarian, or pastoral, or at least
nonindustrial groups, worksongs are by no means unknown in the urban environment.
The cries, chants, patters, and pitches of various occupations—peddlers, vendors, junk
dealers, ragmen, shoeshine operators, grinders, and others—were until recently a
common feature of many large cities; Baltimore, Charleston, South Carolina, and New
Orleans have been especially renowned for such traditions. Although most of these forms
have virtually vanished, the auctioneer’s chant still enjoys a living tradition, and one may
hear similar performances from carnival barkers or roving concessionaires at sporting
events.
On the whole, however, the contemporary urban context, the growth of technology,
and the consequent mechanization of most occupations have been no kinder to worksong
than to most other older forms of traditional music. Rather, worksong traditions survive
in the late 20th century almost exclusively in settings where manual labor or physical
activity serves an institutionalized function, as in the marching cadences of American
servicemen and women. In fact, most of the foregoing traditions were moribund by the
time folklorists began systematically recording them during the early to mid-20th
century. Not coincidentally, the most extensive collections of African American gang
songs were amassed between 1930 and the late 1960s in Southern prison farms, where
forced agricultural labor was exacted as a penal sentence—in some cases, long after the
mechanization of farm work had obliterated these traditions in the general population.
One can hardly, then, mourn the passing of these remnants of the venerable Black
worksong tradition.
In the 1990s, the average American is most likely to encounter traditional worksong at
one remove—that is, through popular or art music, often reflecting professional
composers’ self-conscious appropriation of folk materials (to cite only two instances, the
backing vocalists on Sam Cooke’s 1960 hit, “Chain Gang,” evoke the wordless antiphony
of a Black work crew, while George Gershwin re-created the Black street cries of
Charleston in his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess). More significant, however, are the less
obvious, though more pervasive, imprints that some worksong traditions have left on
popular idioms; again, the case is strongest for the African American strain, which
substantially influenced the development of 20th-century genres such as the blues and
gospel and, through these, contemporary world popular music.
John Minton
References
Cohen, Norm. 1993. Worksongs: A Demonstration Collection of Examples. In Songs about Work:
Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A.Reuss, ed. Archie Green. Special Publications of
the Folklore Institute No. 3. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 332–355.