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Overview

The work song was part of the African culture long before Africans came to the North American continent's shores and remained so for a long time after their arrival. In the community's performance of work songs in West Africa, laborers sang songs that enhanced their ability to work by creating a group consciousness that allowed them to function at a steady, rhythmic pace via the call-and-response pattern (James 1955, 16). Author Tilford Brooks makes note that "…while the practice of singing to accompany one's labor is indigenous to West Africa, it is obvious that working one's own field in his own land is quite different from forced labor in a foreign land. Thus, the references in the songs accompanying the work changed radically" (Brooks 1984, 43).

Be ready to:

Describe the importance of the work song to the African before arriving to North American

Identify how work songs translated into enslaved African work ethic on Southern plantations.

Describe the importance of the work gang singing leader to the creation of a work song.

Identify why a slave master did not like a slave that did not sing.

List the four essential functions of prison work songs.

Describe the type of work songs associated with movement and non-movement.

Describe the African American musical traits found in the work songs "Hammer Ring," "Go Down Old Hannah," "Chopping in the New Ground," and "Mighty Bright Light."

Describe the critical role of the gandy dancer.

Identify the significance of the role of John Henry to the railroad industry.

Articulate the significance of Anansi to the Trickster tale tradition.

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Work Song Types in General: Prison Work Songs

Even after slavery ended, a disproportionate number of Black people ended up in prison based on racist policies and policing. These prisoners, like all prisoners, were also forced to work for little to no wages. Prison work songs had a role to play in this forced labor system. According to Bruce Jackson, prison work songs served at least four essential functions:

They helped supply a meter for work, which was useful for survival in the dangerous work of tree-cutting, efficient in other kinds of work, and according to the singers, a more aesthetically pleasing way of working.

They helped pass the time, which was necessary because prison labor is usually dull.

They offered a partial outlet for the inmates' tensions, frustrations, and anger. A long tradition in the South permits the Black man to sing things he is not allowed to say; the Whites never assumed the words Blacks sang had any meaning. "In the river songs," one inmate said, "you tell the truth about how you feel. You can't express it to the boss. They really be singing about the way they feel inside. Since they can't say it to nobody, they sing a song about it." (In Texas, Black convicts called the work songs "river songs" because all of the Texas prisons were located on the Brazos or Trinity River bottomlands.)

They kept a man from being singled out for whipping because he worked too slowly. The songs kept all workers together so that their enslavers could not beat an individual to death for mere weakness. In Texas, slow workers were punished by ten or more licks with the "Bat," a strip of leather thirty inches long, four inches wide, one-quarter-inch thick, attached to a wooden handle. One inmate said, "When the hide'd leave, the skin'd leave with it" (Jackson 1994, n. p.).

Prison songs, as with many work songs sung by enslaved Africans and later, exemplifies many African music traits. A classic example of a work song that exemplifies many of the African musical traits discussed in this course is "Hammer Ring♫" sung by Jesse Bradley and a group from the State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, in 1934. The liner notes of the recording state:

The most dynamic of Negro work rhythms are to be found in the hammer songs. Of 'Hammer, Ring,' John A. Lomax has written: 'The men who drove the spikes that fastened the long steel rails to the wooden ties sang the most thrilling tune of all-the hammer song, song of the ten-pound hammer with its two heads scarcely more than a couple of inches in diameter, that was swung free from the shoulder in a complete circle about the head ... that song with its own individual vibrant and stirring tune.'

The Bible story of Noah and the ark, which is also the theme of spirituals, is here used to dramatize the work, with echoes of ballad and game-song usage (Botkin nd, 5).

In this work song, each solo line is sung twice by the leader. After each line, there is a fixed choral response in the text. Read the lyrics below and note the repetition and fixed choral response.

Hammer Ring

Chorus
Won't you ring, old hammer? (sung by the leader)
Hammer Ring. (sung by the chorus)
Won't you ring, old hammer? (sung by the leader)
Hammer Ring. (sung by the chorus)

Broke the handle on my hammer, (sung by the
leader)
Hammer ring. (sung by the chorus)
Broke the handle on my hammer, (sung by the
leader)
Hammer ring. (sung by the chorus)

Got to hammerin' in the Bible.
Gotta talk about Norah.
Well, God told Norah.
You is a-goin' in the timber.
You argue some Bible.
Well, Norah got worried.
What you want with the timber?
Won't you build me a ark, sir?
Well, Norah asked God, sir.
How high do you want it?
Build it forty-two cubits.
Every cubit have a window.
Well, it started into ranin'.
Old Norah got worried.
He called his children.
Well, Norah told God, sir.
This is a very fine hammer.
Got the same old hammer.
Got to hammerin' in the timber

Gale P. Jackson

Work songs document the central experience in the lives of most Africans in the early history of the Americas who worked 'from sun up until sundown,' recognized the true extent of their worth, and despite the pervasive and horrific violence, brutality, and trauma of enslavement, drew sustenance from their own strength and accomplishments.

Frederick Douglass

They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.