Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain

Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering, and E111111a Robens(m. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 347 pp. Bibliog. Index. ISBN 978-1-107-00017-9.165.00. L.S$99.00. Rhytbms of Labour: Music at Work in BriI'if ii. 2 x CD. [pounds sterling]10.00. The premise and subject matter of this book is deceptively simple--that the workplace has always been a key site of song and music in Britain. By 'music at work' the authors are keen to emphasize right from the first that they do not mean only, or mainly. 'work song', a category first defined by the elder Lomax in the 1930s. He saw 'work song' as a essentially the product of Afro-American society, providing call and answer song texts to aid or ease work. Such songs clearly do exist in the British Isles, and the book devotes the best part of a chapter to a .discussion of waulking songs and shanties, the most obvious of these. However, it is not these or any other particular category of songs that are of most interest to the authors: rather, they .are interested in the social site of singing--in this case the workplace. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] C, 1 As they admit, we immediately hit a problem, that of evidence. It is now well known that the pioneer collectors of the first folk song revival, on whom we rely for the majority of our folk song texts, were little interested in the songs' context. As a result, we have little evidence from that source as to when and where songs were sung. However, a careful search of the broader literature seems to revel that at least in preindustrial occupations singing at work was widespread. Why did people sing at work? Here the answers are hugely various. Loosely, the book sees two main reasons, which, paraphrasing Harry Cox, they call 'ffincy' and 'function'. 'Fancy' is singing that allows you to 'escape'--'singing . . .1 could bring into the regular working day an element of play' (p. 67). 'Function' is where the songs, like those of shantying or waulking, 'appeared to have a primarily functional value in the pacing, rhythm and coordination of labour' (p. 75). However, they argue convincingly that, although there is opposition between these forms, it is a dialectical one, one in which 'the dream of play' existed even in the most functional of songs. The functional songs, because they are sung in a group, also open up questions of community. It is clear from a good deal of sociological and anthropological work that performing music together creates a sense of shared identity or community. This, the authors argue, was also a key element. However, here they also stress the importance of gender, arguing that men and women rarely worked together in mixed groups outside family-based labour. The first part of the book, which deals broadly with British society before c.1860, argues, largely convincingly, that singing at work in a variety of ways was widespread. across most trades. The second part seeks to deal with the situation after the process of industrialization was firmly under way. Here things were very different. Factory discipline frequently forbade singing, but, probably more importantly, the noise of machines simply made singing impossible. Nevertheless, the book argues that fragments of singing continued, although often hidden by the noise. Some groups, particularly women, seem to have held on to, or created, traditions of singing in factories. Here they look at singing in the mills of Northern Ireland and Dundee, and, most surprisingly, the munitions factories of the Second World War. Interestingly, all these situations produced spasmodic singing, songs breaking out and vanishing again. My father worked most of his early life in the motor trade and I remember in the workshop when a temporary silence occurred somebody would half sing, half shout ditties like 'I'm going back to Imazaz / Imazaz the pub next door'. This fragmentary singing in the factories of the Second World War, and especially their repertoire, led inevitably to the institutional introduction of music into factories, first by employers and eventually by the BBC Light Programme with Music While You Work. …