I asked this question here a long time ago, and I never got a response. Maybe it's because my question was buried too deep in a thread and nobody noticed.

Several years ago I visited New Orleans as a tourist, and took a bus tour. The driver/tour-guide was a retired school teacher who had lived in New Orleans all his life. While driving past the French Market, which formerly sold mainly produce but now sells mainly things that appeal to tourists, he told us that as a kid he had earned pocket money by going there early in the morning, before school, and the stall owners would pay him to unload trucks. He mentioned: "...and they taught us to sing counting songs." He explained that, if a vendor had agreed to buy, say, 30 watermelons from a wholesaler, then the workers would have to count them as they unloaded them, and they would sing out the numbers as they did so.

I asked him to sing us a counting song, but he refused. He explained, though, that "any song that you already know can be turned into a counting song. You just sing numbers instead of words." That's all the information I got out of him.

It strikes me that this is both an effective way to count and a way to keep both buyers and sellers honest, since either side can "audit" the count. It might even point to the origin of the word "audit"--to listen. And of course, like any work song, it keeps the workers working steadily, in coordination. And this could be used in a lot of situations. And maybe it is no coincidence that the French Market is right next to the port of New Orleans, where fruit from the Caribbean is being transshipped from ocean-going ships to trucks, trains, and formerly riverboats and wagons for distribution all over North America. And this has been going on for about 300 years now.

Yet in all my years of knowing about various kinds of work song, I have never heard of a "counting song" being used this way. A Google search for "counting song" mainly turns up children's songs: "One little, two little, three little Indians...." which, I think, is not the same thing, but then I don't know the origin of Ten Little Indians, either.

So, has anyone heard of counting songs as a subtype of work songs? Has anyone researched or written about this?