Work Songs and Field Hollers

            In the 19th and early 20th centuries, African and Afro-descendent 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]

             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, 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]  

    Bibliography

      [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. <p class="MsoFootnoteText">       <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[2]  Jones, Blues People, 19.  <p class="MsoFootnoteText">       <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[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.  <p class="MsoFootnoteText">       <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[4]  Palmer, Deep Blues, 23-25.  <p class="MsoNormal">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US; mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[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. <p class="MsoFootnoteText">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[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. <p class="MsoFootnoteText">      <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">[7]  Led Zeppelin, recording of “I Can’t Quit You Babe” on Led Zeppelin [1], Atlantic 588171, 1969, compact disc.