[4] Both hunting and the keeping of livestock tended to involve small groups or individuals, usually boys and young men, who would spend long hours working, away from the centers of settlement.
[4] Rhythms of work songs, similar to an African drum beat, served to synchronize physical movement in groups, coordinating sowing, hoeing, and harvesting.
Enslaved people sang improvised verses to mock their overseers, express frustrations, and share dreams of escaping.
Yankee Doodle is thought to have started out as a harvest song, its words possibly originating from farmers in 15th century Holland.
It contained mostly nonsensical and out-of-place words that were presumably sung to a similar—if not the same—tune: "Yanker, didel, doodle down, Diddle, dudel, lanther, Yanke viver, voover vown, Botermilk und tanther."
Farm laborers in Holland at the time received as their wages "as much buttermilk (Botermilk) as they could drink, and a tenth (tanther) of the grain".
[12] Work songs helped to pass down information about the lived experience of enslaved people to their communities and families.
Anne Kimzey of the Alabama Center For Traditional Culture writes: "All-black gandy dancer crews used songs and chants as tools to help accomplish specific tasks and to send coded messages to each other so as not to be understood by the foreman and others.
Sung by slaves who had the job of rowing, this type of work song is characterized by "plaintive, melancholy singing."
According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries.
These songs were typically performed while adjusting the rigging, raising anchor, and other tasks where men would need to pull in rhythm.
[23] As cowboys were romanticised in the mid-twentieth century they became extremely popular and played a part in the development of country and western music.
[24] 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.
[24] 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.
[24] 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 nineteenth century.
Lead Belly knew hundreds of work hollers and traditional songs from the cotton fields, railroads and prison gangs.
In the 1940s he toured widely on college campuses and folk music venues, popularising songs including "Take This Hammer", "John Henry" "Boll Weevil" and "Midnight Special".
Mining songs written in the late 1940s by country artists Merle Travis ("Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon") and Billy Edd Wheeler ("Coal Tattoo") also became fireside standards.
The "dustbowl balladeer" Woody Guthrie wrote and performed work-related songs such as "Deportee" and "Talking Hard Work" in the 1940s and 1950s.
Guthrie and other politically active performers, especially the Weavers with Pete Seeger, continued the Union Songs movement that had begun with Joe Hill in the early 1900s.
From that time, most topical and activist singers including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs performed work-related songs.
Waulking songs from Scotland are a traditional genre performed while women communally beat and felted cloth.