Work Songs

For me, they are poems as well as songs. I love them for three reasons; their rhythmic certainty, their often original verses and their working-class origins. Nearly always they were meant to be sung or chanted while a particular piece of group work was undertaken, the rhythm being taken from the muscular exertion expended in the regular sweep of a tool, or echoing the sound of a piece of machinery, or of an animal roped, also, to an industrial activity. Often, they are the only on-the-spot records we have of a particular job within an industry, some long gone. Alive with sadness, boredom, fear or determination to get the job finished, they pinpoint the voices of real people in real, often cruel and slave-like conditions and what they needed to do as a group to survive dull, repetitive and exploitative work during long work hours. History can live again through their songs and verses.

They cover many industries, from the domestic to the large-scale industrial or agricultural. “Sarasbunda” is a nonsense Dutch spinning song, sung by women working their own spinning-wheels at home; its counterpart is “Poverty Knocks” sung in the C19th Lancashire cotton mills, with all their deafening clack and clamour. “Fourpence a Day,” probably from the Durham or Newcastle area, gives an insight into lead-mining and ore-washing during the C19th, with even young children having to be woken by the village “Knocker-up” while it was still dark, then tramp to the mines with cold, wet, underpaid work in prospect. Often the songs were the only form of subversion the workers had before unionisation took effect in late Victorian times. The earlier “Wauking Songs” from Scotland, sung while a group of women pounded and passed a length of woven woollen cloth or tweed from hand to hand around a table come from the tradition of small home industries. Scottish fisherwomen, too, had their own song in “Buy My Caller Herrin’.” Even children’s games echoed their parents’ occupations; “The Thread Follows the Needle” from the South of England is one such from the time that clothes were made and repaired at home.

Agriculture was well represented. “The Churning Song” from the American Northwest with its telling line of “Aching back and weary arm/Quite rob churning of its charm,” indicates that women worked as hard as the men out in the fields. There are reaping songs and not just of wheat; “Green Grow the Rushes, O” was sung while cutting reeds for weaving. Milling is represented by the song from the Northeast, “Hey, With a Gay and Grinding, O.” Full of sexual references, its rhythm is taken from the speed of the windmill’s turning sails and the grinding of the machinery in the mill building below. Even riding to the local fair had its own song in “Widecombe Fair,” the rhythm echoing a gallop. Hunting had its own quota; “The Dusky Night Rides Down the Sky,” “D’ye Ken John Peel” are two well-known examples. Poachers, too, were represented in “The Lincolnshire Poacher,” though I doubt that one was sung while actually at work!

America is rich in work songs from the days of railway-building, herd-driving by cowboys, sail-shipping and whaling. But the most telling are the slave songs, or field hollers from the American cotton plantations: “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen,” is the painful wail of a desolated spirit under slavery; by contrast, “Jimmy Crack Corn” contains an act of defiance because the slave-master is away for a while. Later, there were songs to be sung on the run along the underground railway, those escape routes for slaves to travel to the north of the country.   

The work songs I’m drawn to most often are sea shanties. Most jobs on the decks of the long-gone sailing ships had their own particular chant or shanty when working the windlass, the pumps, the capstan and the various types of sails. Their rhythms and metres differed according to which job was being done. In addition, there were those for hauling in fishing nets and others for swilling the decks and bilges. Usually, a ship’s crew would appoint a shantyman from among their number; he would call or sing the verse of the shanty while the crew joined in with the refrain. “Way, Haul Away” was sung in 2/2 time while hauling on the bowlines to hoist the mainsails; it is a short-haul shanty. “Blow the Man Down” was sung to a 4/4 rhythm while hauling the halyards to hoist the topsail; it’s from the group of long-drag shanties. “Boney Was a Warrior” is unusual; it’s a four-line short-haul chant with a refrain after every two lines in 3/4 time; its reference to Bonaparte dates it to the early C19th. “We’re Bound for South Australia” is a pumping shanty, sung when pumping out the holds. “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor” was for capstan-turning, its dactylic metre used to alleviate the boredom of a seemingly endless task; with sails, you could at least see the result of hauling. I'm aware that the early, simple sea-chants can hardly be classed as poetry, but they led to better things later on in the C19th.

There are thousands of work songs and chants from across the world, all of them representing the output, poetic and musical, of working people doing ordinary, but heavy work in difficult conditions. While some, such as Malcolm Arnold's “Three Shanties,” written for a woodwind quintet, have been incorporated into mainstream music, generally, they haven’t been accorded the same respect by poets, let alone be adopted into whatever mainstream poetic canon applies at any particular historical point. It’s beyond time for that situation to be redressed. Hence, in shanty style, the poem below, "Lick and Wash."