Since the earliest days of slavery, singing has accompanied all kinds of group and individual work activities of African Americans. These improvised songs, known as work songs, field calls (also field hollers) and street calls (also street cries) served many functions. Singing passed the time, coordinated the movements of workers and offered encouragement. They also communicated human emotions and provided a forum for criticizing whites in positions of authority.

As Africans in America, the enslaved retained many customs of the past, which remained relevant after the abolition of slavery. While working long hours in the cotton and tobacco fields or clearing brush, husking and grinding corn, cutting wood, rowing boats, and laying railroad tracks, and as stevedores and fishermen, they sang work songs to pass the time, relieve boredom, and coordinate the movements of repetitive manual labor. Many work crews had song leaders who improvised a line, to which the others responded with a refrain. This singing style is heard in “Lost John” by a prison farm work group. Other work songs consisted only of repeated choruses.

Even though work songs commonly are associated with groups, individuals, who worked alone in the field or at a distance from others, used song as a personal form of communication. Their improvised utterances, known as field calls/field hollers, conveyed human needs (i.e. calling for water and food) as well as expressed human emotions of fatigue and loneliness. The latter is heard in the wordless song “Arwhoolie.” Crew leaders also used calls to give work instructions, as did Henry Truvillion in “Rails Unloading.” Street vendors in towns and cities used street calls (also known as street cries) to describe and sell products, such as watermelons, peaches, apples, ice cream, etc. Individuals also sang while performing other common work activities such as weaving, cooking, cleaning, and shining shoes.

Work songs/field calls became a forum for satirical commentary and protest. As both slaves and free people, African Americans poked fun at whites and frequently expressed their displeasure of poor working conditions, the unreasonable expectations of overseers/employers and inhumane treatment from those in authority as communicated by Rich Amerson in “Railroad, 2” and heard in “Complaint Call.”

Work songs are improvised using call-and-response structures, repetitive refrain lines, or choruses. They are sung in heterophony with melodic and timbral variation. Field and street calls are also improvised but vary in structure according to a freely personalized style. Some contain a few words or short phrases, but others consist of non-verbal utterances such as moans and hollers. An observer describes such singing: