Work songs can include content focused around the surrounding environment, resistance, or protest.
[1] Their work songs portrayed their specific standpoint and experiences during the slavery period in the United States.
Many of the women's songs discuss their past and present suffering under slavery and prospects for freedom.
One song speaks of a family being torn apart by sales: "Mammy, is Ol'Massa gwin'er sell us tomorrow?
Scholar Lauri Ramsey classifies songs sung by enslaved peoples in the lyric poetry tradition.
She says that lyric poetry can be described as "conveying the voices of particular individuals, speaking in their own dictions (or dramatizing those of characters), addressing their own communities, and selecting from a wide range of 'acceptable' forms or prosodic features employed either conventionally or innovatively.
Often enslaved peoples were combined with groups from other cultures and forced to give up their specific traditions and heritage.
Many owners of plantations thought that because their workers sang in the fields, it meant that the slaves were happy doing their work.
Jacqueline Jones comments on how song helped to create community: On many plantations, it was the custom to release adult women from fieldwork early on Saturday so that they could do their week's washing.
[7]: 251 Scholar Gale Jackson acknowledges the complexity of black women's work songs and says, "African American women's work and play songs utilize characteristically African modalities of storytelling, improvisational 'bantering,' and historical documentation, pairing song and dance in percussive, multi-metered, polyphonic, call and response performance, to engage in circles of ancestry, articulation of journey, acts of witness, transformative pedagogy, and communal art making.