In the days when things were less mechanized work songs helped to synchronize the activity of the workers. Cadences to sea shanties and work songs helped to alleviate boredom and helped to provide a pace to activities. With radios to relieve boredom and machines taking over many of the repetitive tasks that relied on human muscle I wonder how long this form of music will last.
Even if people record the lyrics and perform the music, this form of music use to have a living quality that needs people to modify it to the task and time period. Without that the music is dead. The last place I know of that these songs truly survive is in different sporting events.
When hiking I remember hearing a song that started
A yellow bird with a yellow bill
Was perched upon my window sill…
There’s a CD of waulking songs in the Scottish Tradition series that is great. From memory, I think they were collected on Barra. Lomax collected a few even earlier (late '40s) which are very funky. A modern group called Bannal, I think, have a CD out of rather stilted ‘concert’ versions of waulking songs which are OK but nowhere near as good as the real thing.
Here’s an exercise for your imagination, Em. First, imagine Nano singing. Now imagine he is singing 'S i Tir Ruin-sa Ghaidhealtachd in Gaelic rather than the English. Now choose a chorus of your favourite singing chiffsters; this is a call and response thing. Imagine a steady rhythmic thumping on the table. OK? Let us begin.
The Ghaidhealtachd is the land that I love, where the cows and calves are in shielings among the glens; the milkmaid goes under them, a large pail in each hand; you will get plenty of it to drink and will not pay a groat for it. The women spin and the young girls card the wool for them. One man sows, another reaps, another fishes in his boat. There you will get salmon, venison and fish to your desire; you will get oat and barley bread. I was reared on it when young. You would not feel the nights long in Bernera. The girls would be waulking and pleasant to me was the sound of their laughter. I will go at Fair time and see all that I would wish there.
When I worked in the gardens at Wash Park in Denver,
I taught my colleagues chain gang songs. We were
pulling weeds; there were twenty flower beds,
and when we got through weeding them we
would start again. We were going kinda nuts.
So imagine you’re walking through the park one day,
you pass a flower bed, and there are four or five
people on their knees in it, weeding. As you approach
you hear them singing:
There’s actually a similarity of structure. It gets lost in the English translation I gave. I’d guess that it has nothing to do with ancient cultural exchange and a lot to do with the repetitive nature of manual labour. But often the similarity is really striking.
2 of my most fave songs are working songs -
First is Yella girls (Doodle let me go) - when sung at the correct pace unison in 3 or more male voices it has the cadence of pulling ropes with a deck heaving from the swell. Very moving
“Harah me yella girls, do do let me go”
Second is “Johny Sangster” a Scottish reaping song. It has the cadence of the sicle moving back and forth cutting barley or wheat.
" O all the seasons o the year when we mun work the sairest "
Funny thing is these songs are very hard to find the lyrics for - Yella girls I’ve only ever heard live - at least one of those singers is dead now. Johny Sangster was a trak on a Topic label vinyl record I once had. No sign of the lyrics online.
Mitch, have you tried looking of those songs under different names? They might well be on the net but simply called something different. Perhaps google on catchy lines.
I plucked that one from the sleevenotes to the Bannal album which is musically sanitised. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were lyrically sanitised too but my Gaelic is far too poor to tell. Now, if only Grandma were still alive.
