Introduction to Lesson 7
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).
In her monumental work, poet, storyteller, and research scholar Gale P. Jackson writes, "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" (Jackson 2015, 777). Work songsA piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either sung while conducting a task (usually to coordinate timing) or a song linked to a task which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song was one of the byproducts of the enslaved African working on plantations in the South. The work songs that accompanied various tasks were not new, but an African transplant to that of a new working environment where the profits belonged to someone else. Jones's description of Black women's work paints a vivid picture of the cycle of tasks involved in their physical labor in this new working environment:
The rhythm of the planting-weeding-harvesting cycle shaped the lives of almost all American slaves, 95% of whom lived in rural areas.... Dressed in coarse osnaburg gowns; their skirts 'reefed up with a chord tied tightly around the body, a little above the hips' … with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, Black women spent up to fourteen hours a day toiling out of doors, often under a blazing sun. In the cotton belt they plowed fields; dropped seed; and hoed, picked, ginned sorted, and moted cotton. On farms in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, women hoed tobacco; laid worm fences; and threshed, raked, and bound wheat. For those on the Sea Islands and in coastal areas, rice culture included raking and burning the stubble from the previous year's crop; ditching; sowing seed; plowing, listing and hoeing fields; and harvesting, stacking, and threshing the rice. In the bayou region of Louisiana, women planted sugar cane cuttings, plowed, and helped harvest and gin the cane. During the winter they performed the myriad of tasks necessary on nineteenth century farms: repairing roads, pitching hay, burning brush, and setting up post and rail fences.
(Jackson 2015, 777; Jones 1985, 14-16)
Watch this 13-minute short film of Singing Fishermen in Ghana. . This film documents work songs of a fishing community in Ghana, the West-African roots of the work-song tradition. The film shows the community singing as it pulls fish nets onto the shore and men on boats in heavy surf singing to pace their rowing.
Concerning the new shape of the work song in America, Tilford Brooks comments that:
White masters suppressed references to the gods and religions of West Africa, not only because they thought all African religious customs were barbarous, but because they feared that too-constant evocation of the African gods could mean that the slaves were planning to leave the plantation as soon as they could…
…Consequently, the work song, as it took its new shape in America, was stripped of all pure African rituals and found a new cultural reference. This was most difficult to do within the African-language songs themselves, however. The diversity of African labor-such as fishing, weaving, and hunting-which was the source of this kind of song, was replaced quite suddenly by unvarying, grinding toil that consisted mainly of cultivating the fields of the White master.
(Brooks 1984, 43)
Under these new working conditions, the slave masters soon realized that the enslaved worked more efficiently when their tasks were synchronized to a consistent rhythmic pulse to "regulate timing and speed of workers, especially those involved in collaborative work" (Burnim 2015, 6). Also, "the slave masters noticed that their slaves worked harder when they sang, and that 'there was usually a lead singer who set the pace for the group. In fact, when slaves were auctioned, singers with the strongest voices brought top prices'" (Floyd 1995, 50).
Frederick Douglass
They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.
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.