This is a wonderful book. Work Songs invites the reader into the best of two worlds—serious theory and fun content. It is written in a clear and easy style, sprinkled here and there with verbal wit and passionate eloquence.

Gioia’s study takes issue with two assumptions that have dominated our culture’s approach to art and music. The first is the “separability principle,” or the idea that art is (and should be) “useless,” entirely divorced from ordinary life. The second is the principle of progress, or the belief that art evolves upward from one generation to the next. Work Songs rebuts both assumptions by exploring the history of the ways that music has “enchanted and transformed our everyday existence.” Gioia suggests an alternative framework, a “‘connectedness principle’…that all music creates linkages with our daily lived experiences, and that this is its greatest blessing for us.”

The first part of the book is organized chronologically, following the evolution of work. It begins with evidence from the Lascaux caves that paintings were placed in hard-to-reach locations with the best acoustics, suggesting a role for music in the lives of pre-historic hunters. We then travel through the diverse worlds, and types of work song, of the cultivator, the herder, and the pre-industrial weaver. A pivotal chapter, “The New Rhythms of Work,” introduces the central role of music after “the pulse of labor [no longer] mimicked the rhythms of nature.” Clocks told time, and music—church bells, drums, singers, trumpets—conveyed the new order of life to workers.

Gioia’s use of many diverse sources, such as historians’ and travelers’ accounts, becomes a dialogue with other folklorists and ethnomusicologists in a series of topical chapters on the work and music of sailors, lumberjacks, cowboys, miners, and prisoners. We learn a lot about the journeys and collections of the Lomaxes, father and son, and their various folklore critics and admirers. For anyone who grew up listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “16 Tons”, the chapter “Take This Hammer!” is a fascinating historical-detective inquiry into competing claims about who John Henry really was, and the ambivalence of what his strength, and the hammer, meant. Nor is the labor movement forgotten—music by the IWW’s Joe Hill, as well as others whose songs served to inspire and unite masses of striking workers who did not speak the same languages, are placed in the musical tradition of utopian visionaries dating back to the early nineteenth century.

Gioia’s definition of work songs is expansive—it includes not only the anonymous “folk” songs sung by workers while working, but also music performed by workers off the job (factory towns with large brass bands), songs written by non-workers about work (“Take this Job and Shove It”), and commercial music played in the workplace—from Muzak, engineered to enhance the modern rhythms of work, to auto workers insisting on their boom boxes, blaring rock and roll over the deafening noise of the assembly line.

This brief review hardly does justice to the intriguing philosophical debates about the nature of music and its role in human life that recur as the book moves through centuries of work and music. One example: the role of music as a “change agent.” Gioia discusses the scientific research about how athletes achieve “peak performance”—or the “flow state” of consciousness—and shows how in many different work contexts and musical traditions, singing together can induce that “extraordinary effortlessness” of work.

The epilogue begins by quoting William Morris: “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.” The opposing view is Abraham Maslow’s postulation that “self-actualization,” the highest human need, is an atomized individual’s responsiveness to his inner muse. Gioia takes us back to the call-and-response of the classic work song to argue that achieving the highest human potential is not individual and isolating, but communal and connecting. “The work song, with its emphasis on community, its integration of individual efforts into a more powerful whole, and its focus on mastery over the immediate demands of the here and now, reminds us of a different set of attitudes to life and labor.”

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[Review length: 678 words • Review posted on April 27, 2009]