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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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Trickster Song and Tales

Another type of song that was important to the African American community were trickster songs and tales. The art of telling stories where the underdog through skill and cunning lives to see another day was part of the enslaved African's "sneak attack on the values of the dominant white culture…undermining its power and control to a degree that made life more tolerable, amusing, and optimistic" (Floyd Jr. 1995, 48).

In the seminal work The Power of Black Music, Samuel Floyd Jr. laments that he is "perhaps the last generation of African Americans whose parents and grandparents were intimately familiar with Br'er Rabit, Legba, the Signifying Monkey, Stackolee, John the Conqueror, and other Black folk characters and practices" (Floyd Jr. 1995, 3). He continues: "My generation grew up hearing the tales of these and other African and African American folk figures, [and heard regularly] great songsters who trudged the streets of neighborhoods singing a cappella or accompanying themselves on the guitar" (Ibid). The trickster tale then in essence "represents everything one would like to do but cannot. The trickster, therefore, presents an alternative, vicarious existence that contrasts with the strict boundaries of slave existence. In a society with limited roles available to African Americans, the trickster provides an outlet for the expression of socially unacceptable themes" (Demelo 2018, 50). Floyd established that African animal trickster characters such Anansi the Spider, Rabbit, Monkey, Fox, Turtle, and others, which Africans brought to the New World, were reincarnated in similar or identical forms central to the new tales African Americans were telling (Ibid). "Since these tales frequently included songs during the narrative, the results were a type of cante fable" (Southern 1997, 173).

Although the word Anansi, associated with the Akan people of Ghana, means spider, a story from Tobago's Caribbean Island tells the name Anansi's genesis. It is stated here in its full context so that the trickster aspect will take on a life of its own:

Why They Name the Stories for Anansi
Once upon a time, Anansi decided that children should call all their stories after him. So he went to Master King and told him this, and Master King said, 'Well, as you know, Blacksnake is a very wise and clever creature. If you can trick him and bring him back to me full-length on a pole, then I will have all those stories named for you. Well, Nansi really wanted his name to be known this way, but is very hard even to catch a snake. Nansi knew that Blacksnake really loved to eat pigs, so he went and set a trap for Blacksnake with a pig as bait. Mr. Blacksnake, though, was very clever and saw immediately that it was a trap, so when he got to it he just raised up his tail and slithered right over it, catching the pig in his mouth as he went by. He took it home and had a good dinner for himself. Well, Nansi then really had to think hard about how he was going to catch Blacksnake. So he tried again. He set another trap with a pig, this time in a place that he knew Mr. Snake passed each day of the week to go for water. Again Mr. Blacksnake saw the trap, so he walked around it, took the pig, and went on his own way. He met Nansi then, and he said to him, 'Nansi, you have been setting these traps for me all around. Why are you doing this when you know I am as wise and clever as you and any other creature?	So Nansi said, 'Well, Mr. Blacksnake, I must tell you the truth. They were talking up there in Master King's yard, and everyone was saying that of all the snakes, the longest is Mr. Yellowtail Snake. I tried to tell them you were much longer, but they just shouted, and so I bet money that you were the longest. So will you come with me and prove to Master King that you are longer than Mr. Yellowtail Snake? Now, Blacksnake was very proud of his length. So he said, 'As a matter of fact, Mr. Nansi, I am much longer than Yellowtail Snake, and I'm glad you told the king because he should know such things.' So Nansi said, 'Well, how can we prove it to Master King? Why don't you lay down as long as you can make yourself, and I'll take you to Master King that way and we'll just prove it together.' So Blacksnake thought for a while and he couldn't see anything wrong with doing it that way, so he just lay down full-length and stretched and stretched himself until he was stretched as full as he could get. And Nansi quickly tied him to a pole as tightly as he could. Nansi just threw that pole across his shoulder and carried him right up to the king: Well, Master King, you see I brought Mr. Blacksnake to you tied up on a pole. So the King said, "Well, after today, I'm going to call all those stories 'Nansi Stories' and I'll order everybody else to do the same, because you were able to trick the wisest and cleverest of the creatures. So that's how we get it that we call all these stories after Mr. Nansi" (Abrahams 1985, 182).

In reading this story,

What does Nansi want?

Who has what he wants?

In what way was Mr. Blacksnake outsmarted? Would you consider Nansi to be a trickster, and why?

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.