These workers tended to take the forms of music with which they were familiar, including ballads and agricultural work songs, and adapt them to their new experiences and circumstances.
[1] Unlike agricultural work songs, it was often unnecessary to use music to synchronise actions between workers, as the pace would be increasingly determined by water, steam, chemical and eventually electric power, and frequently impossible because of the noise of early industry.
This pattern can be seen in the first industry to fully develop, textile production, which was particularly important in Lancashire, with songs like 'Poverty knock' which described the relentless movement and noise of the loom.
[1] He also noted the existence of songs about heroic and mythical figures of industrial work, like the coal miners the 'Big Hewer' or 'Big Isaac' Lewis.
[1] This tendency was even more marked in early American industrial songs, where representative heroes like Casey Jones and John Henry were eulogised in blues ballads from the 19th century.
In the second wave of revival, which was much more influenced by progressive or labour politics and as a result tended to show a much greater interest in the lives of working people and their music.
Pete Seeger's Folkways LP American Industrial Ballads (1956) was an early survey of this kind of song.
[16] In the United States, arguably the most successful inheritor of the tradition is Bruce Springsteen, often focusing more on industrial decline in songs like "Youngstown" on his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad.