Work Songs , livre ebook

368

pages

English

Ebooks

2006

Écrit par
Gioia Ted Gioia

Publié par
Duke University Press

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368

pages

English

Ebooks

2006

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

13 avril 2006

EAN13

9780822387688

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

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 miners: 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.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

13 avril 2006

EAN13

9780822387688

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Work Songs

t e d g i o i a

Work Songs

Duke University Press Durham and London 2006

∫2006 Duke University Press

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Minion

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

To my mother

d o r o t h y g i o i a

u c o n t e n t s

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

prefaceix introduction1: Why Work Songs? The Hunter 13 The Cultivator 35 The Herder 63 Thread and Cloth 79 The New Rhythms of Work 99 Sea and Shore 115 The Lumberjack 137 Take This Hammer! 150 The Cowboy 169 The Miner 182 The Prisoner 200 The Labor Movement and Songs of Work 225 Music and the Modern Worker 242 epilogue256: The Calling notes261 recommended listening305 bibliography313 index337

u p r e f a c e

Can songs born of hard labor and the workaday life hold relevance for us today? In 1996 Anna Chairetakis and Mary Taylor conducted a fascinating experiment, assembling a group of tough, young former inmates in the inner city, and asking them to listen to the old work song recordings made half a century earlier by convicts at Parchman Farm. What would be their reaction? Would they see this music as an embarrassment, or perhaps a degrading spectacle of a bygone era that, like bare-ﬁsted boxing or bearbaiting, had persisted too long and was best forgotten? Or would the music speak to them in terms they could understand? Let’s hear some of their responses:

‘‘I think these songs have a great value, a great lesson: the will of the human spirit—the will to survive and go on, no matter what, and in spite of every-thing.’’ ‘‘Oh man, it really makes me grateful for this moment. A lot of times in the day I sit down and complain about my problems and my troubles. And just listening to them [the convicts], they went through so much more than I can ever dream of going through, and they were still able to sing.’’ ‘‘It’s almost like they su√ered so that we don’t have to, you know, su√er as much as they did.’’ ‘‘They sing with a lot of hope and strength. They sing for inspiration, survival.’’ ‘‘The songs were a way to vocalize that they can get to a better life.’’

I began this project a decade ago convinced (much like these listeners) that this music possessed multilayered meanings and rich implications— aesthetic, social, and perhaps even moral; qualities that were lost in the typical one-dimensional presentation of work songs found in textbooks and other writings or, even worse, in ﬁlms and various forms of popular culture. Even more, I believed that the work song could teach us lessons about music making in general, lessons that might enhance our apprecia-tion and understanding of other styles of performance. But, above all, I

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