Work Songs

by Ted Gioia

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, author of several acclaimed books on the history of jazz, 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. In an engaging, conversational writing style, he 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 Who can listen to these and other songs borne of toil and hard labor without feeling their sweep and power? Ultimately, Work Songs , like its companion volume Healing Songs , is an impassioned tribute to the extraordinary capacity of music to enter into day-to-day lives, to address humanity’s deepest concerns and most heartfelt needs.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Ted Gioia (1957) is an American jazz critic and music historian.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not just fascinating, but, I think, important to understanding how most people have experienced both music and work in all the world's cultures and through most of history - including some things that have been lost in the modern era. This book is not just a bit of niche musicology; I believe any person could benefit from reading it.

The introduction was frustrating to me because the author seems to oppose the idea of music for its own sake - or at least the idea that music's true function is not for use. For example, on the first page, he disapprovingly quotes Ralph Vaughan Williams, who said that the great thing about music is that it has no use, music is just music. Gioia seems to think that Vaughan Williams is opposing the use of music in various activities. But Williams, the composer of music for worship, isn't really saying there *can* be no legitimate use of music in other contexts - he is saying that there is something fundamentally gratuitous about music and that it is this element that is at the heart of music qua music. This doesn't mean that music can't lend its value to things outside itself. In fact, f music has no transcendent element in itself then it can't lend a transcendent element to (or, perhaps more accurately, bring it out in) other activities.

In the intro, Gioia almost seems to think that music for listening is mere entertainment and we have to look to how music is used in everyday activities to discover its true meaning. There is nothing about beauty or contemplation in the intro. But the epilogue is much better and shows he is basically on the right track; he isn't really denying the value of just sitting and listening to music, but to recover the experience of beauty in everyday situations and to give even the most menial work a greater dignity and a creative aspect. I believe the gratuitous element mentioned above is precisely why work songs can elevate work. Hopefully Gioia would agree with this (maybe I'll send him an email about it, and/or see how this idea develops in the next two volumes, Healing Songs and Love Songs).

The meat of the book, the historical work, is superb and, as usual with Gioia, very readable. There are so many great little anecdotes and gems, like Alan Lomax finding 20th-century Spanish shepherds still singing ballads the wars of Charlemagne and songs of courtly love accompanied by medieval instruments. And of course, you will discover a plethora of great musical recordings to look up on YouTube.

The epilogue ends with a great little segment that Gioia's Catholic way of thinking. He uses the musical metaphor of call-and-response to make a deeper point about the value of work. I'll quote one paragraph:

"Today, we seldom hear the words 'vocation' or 'calling.' They strike the ear as quaint or old-fashioned. More often we speak either of 'careers' or 'jobs.' But these various terms are not interchangeable: a career is pursued for our own ends; a job is done for somebody else. But the terms calling or vocation convey the clear sense of usefulness to both others and ourselves: our calling finds its meaning only when we do something for others, and its benefit to us exists only to the extent that our labor reaches out into the surrounding community - perhaps only the community of our fellow-workers, although at times to larger social units. The calling involves, almost by definition, a responding."

[Hannah]

Absolutely fantastic. I would commit terrible crimes (...like breaking and entering?) for the opportunity to spend a week in this guy's library.

[Peter Nowakowski]

this was a VERY interesting book