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It arrived as the music of dire necessity, the work song, the psalm, and was subsequently used to distract and entertain captors, or to scare them off with screams and moans they couldn’t decipher.

It’s an inverse work song, one that juxtaposes hard toil with a flow that cannot be interrupted by the frustrations of the proletariat.

But Belafonte was making a statement by opening an album with a work song about backbreaking drudgery.

The whole hour is just this sort of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatically spare sets that imply segregation and incarceration, the weather system that called herself Odetta.

It’s a story forged not just by African roots — work songs and church choirs, field calls and bebop, storied blues and jazz masters.