Here's a number worth sitting with: by 1932, the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan employed over 75,000 workers, and enforced a strict no-talking policy on the floor. No talking. Certainly no singing.
For most of recorded human history, communal labour and communal song were essentially the same activity. Cornish tin miners in the 1840s sang in the dark. Merchant sailors coordinated the hauling of sails through call-and-response shanties, the rhythm wasn't decorative, it was mechanical. Cotton pickers in Mississippi in the 1890s used field hollers to communicate across distance and endure hours that would break a stopwatch. Steelworkers, railroad gangs, quarry crews, all of them sang, and the singing was functional, not performative.
The break didn't happen overnight. It happened in layers.
First came Frederick Winslow Taylor, who in 1911 published The Principles of Scientific Management, a document that essentially argued human workers should behave like machine components. Rhythm was acceptable only if the machine set it. Personal rhythm, group rhythm, improvised rhythm: inefficient.
Then came the moving assembly line at Highland Park, Michigan in January 1914. Workers were now positioned, not gathered. You don't sing in a line where everyone faces away from each other.
The union folk movement of the 1930s and 1940s, Woody Guthrie, the Almanac Singers, later Pete Seeger's work through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, was actually a revival attempt, not a continuation. By the time Seeger was teaching crowds to sing along at Newport in 1963, the original context that made the singing necessary had already been dismantled for forty years.
The radio finished the job. Why sing badly together when you can listen to professionals alone?
By 1955, communal work-song was essentially a museum exhibit. The exhibit was lovingly curated. But the building it came from had been demolished.
What do you think actually killed it, the factory floor, the broadcast, or something else entirely? Drop your take below.