Wiki Page, History of Rock-n-Roll: Graded Learning Activity: Slave Songs, Work Songs and Field Hollers

Wiki Page
2022-06-03T16:59:31-06:00

Slave songs, work songs, & field hollers stem from the oral tradition of African music.

Slave Songs

These songs were performed by slaves as they worked on plantations, hollering to each other across the fields, worshipped together, or at other gatherings for entertainment. This “hybrid musical language” developed by using variations of the third and seventh degrees of the scale, known as “blue notes."

Typically, these “blue notes” were lowered to create a unique scale. After the use of instruments was banned from slaves, field hollers and work songs continued the musical tradition by using the body and voice in several ways. Clapping hands and stomping feet are both examples of how slaves would use their bodies to create sound with intention of imitating African drum rhythms.

The strong, rhythmic pulse helped “regulate the rhythm of their work or ease the burden of physically exhausting work,” such as work in the fields or prison. During these songs, group participation was very important and often included call-and-response forms.

As a review, this form is explained in the following way: a leader performs a more difficult part and is followed by the group’s response either vocally or through percussive sounds using their body.

Christian Slave Song

In this scene, Solomon seems to express about twenty different emotions in this song - sorrow, liberation, and despair. This scene is so strong, it portrays so well the moment when you are so tired, fed up, and sad, that you just let it go, and put all your hopes in God.

Work Songs

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, African and Afro-descendant workers in the Mississippi Delta were forced to perform intensive manual labor as slaves, freemen in an oppressive sharecropping society, or on state prison chain gangs, penalized under a severely unjust legal system.[1]

In these contexts, workers sang improvised, participatory songs, reflecting a distinctly African tendency to sing as a group.[2] The songs served a variety of functional purposes, such as maintaining rhythm and keeping a crew moving in unison, “[easing] the burden of physically exhausting work,” or simply uplifting the spirits of a downtrodden and oppressed people.[3]

Improvised Singing During Work

The improvised lyrics of these work songs dealt directly with the particular job that the singer was doing at the time or commented on some aspect of his immediate environment; personalized lyrical commentary remained a critical feature of blues lyrics and later extended into other styles, particularly hip-hop.[4]

Similarly, the antiphonic, call-and-response style, wherein one worker would sing a solo statement and the rest would respond in unison, would later become a critical feature of the blues style, although the response would be replaced by a guitar played with a slide or other instrument that imitated the human voice.

Field Hollers vs Work Songs

Field hollers, unlike work songs, were generally sung by a single worker, and often contained moans, simple phrases like “hoh-oh lord,” and “hey hey-ey-ey,” and extended vocal flourishes on single words - all delivered with greater emphasis on vocal expression than on lyrical content, and with vocal slides, bends, blue notes, and growls characteristic of African music (an excellent example is Tangle Eye Blues).[5]

These vocal inflections would be incorporated into the blues as what W.C. Handy calls “filling of breaks” with interjections like “Oh Lawdy” and “Oh Baby!”[6]

The moaning quality of holler vocals diminished somewhat in later styles but can be heard in the vocals of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Howlin’ Wolf, both of whom influenced subsequent blues and rock groups - the influence of the field holler is clearly heard in Robert Plant’s vocal on Led Zeppelin’s I Can’t Quit You Babe. [7]

Graded Activity:

Please complete the following Learning Activity: Slave Songs, Work Songs and Field Hollers

Sources

1. Palmer, “Beginnings,” chap. 1 in Deep Blues; Henrietta Yurchenco, "Blues Fallin' Down Like Hail: Recorded Blues, 1920s-1940s,” American Music 13, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 453.

2. Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka]. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963. 19.

3. Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 73; Yurchenco, “Blues Fallin’ Down Like Hail,” 449.

4. Palmer, Deep Blues, 23-25.

5. Tangle Eye, “Tangle Eye Blues,” field recording by Alan Lomax on Alan Lomax: Blues Songbook, Rounder Select Rounder 82161-1866-2, 2003, compact disc.

6. W.C. Handy, “The Music of a Free People,” in Readings in Black American Music, ed. Eileen Southern (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1971), 205.

7. Led Zeppelin, recording of “I Can’t Quit You Babe” on Led Zeppelin [1], Atlantic 588171, 1969, compact disc.