Definitions and Categories
Records of work songs are roughly as old as historical records, and anthropological evidence suggests that all agrarian societies tend to have them. Most modern commentators on work songs have included both songs sung while working as well as songs about work, since the two categories are seen as interconnected. Norm Cohen divided collected work songs into domestic, agricultural or pastoral, sea shanties, African American work songs, songs and chants of direction and street cries. Ted Gioia further divided agricultural and pastorals songs into hunting, cultivation and herding songs, and highlighted the industrial or proto-industrial songs of cloth workers, factory workers, seamen, lumberjacks, cowboys and miners. He also added prisoner songs and modern work songs.
Note that there is also a jazz standard called Work Song, released on the 1960 recording: "Them Dirty Blues (1960)" by alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.
Read more about this topic: Work Song
Famous quotes containing the words definitions and/or categories:
“What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)