All societies have relied on music to transform the experience of work. Song accompanied the farmer’s labors, calmed the herder’s flock, and set in motion the spinner’s wheel. Today this tradition continues. Music blares on the shop floor; song accompanies transactions in the retail store; the radio keeps the trucker going on the long-distance haul.
Now Ted Gioia ... tells the story of work songs from prehistoric times to the present. Vocation by vocation, Gioia focuses attention on the rhythms and melodies that have attended tasks such as the cultivation of crops, the raising and lowering of sails, the swinging of hammers, the felling of trees.... [H]e synthesizes a breathtaking amount of material, not only from songbooks and recordings but also from travel literature, historical accounts, slave narratives, folklore, labor union writings, and more. He draws on all of these to describe how workers in societies around the world have used music to increase efficiency, measure time, relay commands, maintain focus, and alleviate drudgery.
At the same time, Gioia emphasizes how work songs often soar beyond utilitarian functions. The heart-wringing laments of the prison chain gang, the sailor’s shanties, the lumberjack’s ballads, the field hollers and corn-shucking songs of the American South, the pearl-diving songs of the Persian Gulf, the rich mbube a cappella singing of South African miners....
Promo for Ted Gioia's Work Songs
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As noted above, work songs do a lot of things: they help reduce boredom when working on repetitive tasks; they help coordinate timing for specific types of work; they protest working conditions and the plight of workers; in hunting and herding societies, a work song's distinctive cries and/or whistles often are used to locate other herders or hunters, or to reveal the location of herds or prey:
Virtually every society on earth has produced work songs, though many of these songs have yet to be collected and published. The ones that have been published usually have been grouped together according to the type of vocation represented (sea shanties and lumberjack ballads, for example), or according to the specific historical context within which they arose (cowboy and bush ballads, for example):
By far the best-known such work songs here in the USA are the songs sung by African-American slaves, songs which are one of the foundations of the blues:
A number of these songs, as might be expected, are now widely available via the Internet. See, for example, here, here and here....
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