Gibb, I appreciate your re-ordering. Please keep at it. I am finding it very helpful. I've been thinking about the "call-response" work song form and it's African American context. I am assuming that roughly speaking, we are talking about a time period for the "emergence" of the chanties proper between about 1810 and 1860, a period of only 50 years. It is likely that at least some of the "work songs" that form the basis for the chanties are much older and even go back into the 1700's. Or, at least the call/response form probably predates the 1800's.

It seems to me that when we are talking about "African American work songs" in the first half of the 19th century, and speaking about a region that runs roughly from Baltimore down the east coast and around the Gulf to Galveston, and goes south and east to include the Caribbean and much of South America on down to Brazil and beyond, we are talking about *slave* songs. I realize that there were free Blacks in all of these areas, but the dominant culture was a slave culture. I believe I remember reading that in South Carolina, there was no such thing, legally, as a "free" Black person, which caused some problems for free Black sailors who happened to land there.

A slave culture means that these African American laborers were not working for themselves, and that they had little or no choice about where they worked, when they worked, or what kind of work they did. We've already mentioned that some plantation owners "leased" out their slaves to work on board ships during the off seasons so they wouldn't have to feed them and so they would still be economically viable and valuable. These Black laborers worked to make the White man wealthy. The work songs they sang helped them survive this situation. See here the sections on the transAtlantic slave trade, slavery in the US and the abolitionist movements:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

As Q has mentioned, there were White "hoosiers" as well as Black ones working the cotton stowing jobs in the Gulf Ports. In those days there was apparently little problem with White guys picking up and using Black songs. And thus the shore work songs became sea-going work songs and evolved into the "chanties, proper", carried there by both Blacks and Whites.

In trying to imagine something about the call-response work song in the context of African American slave culture, I realized that there was a somewhat contemporary example of how this might have worked and sounded. I say "somewhat contemporary" because it seems that the practice I want to mention is probably no longer a live tradition. But it was so as recently as the 1960s. I am referring to the African American experience of prison labor in the South, what is popularly known as "the chain gang".

African Americans in the Southern prison systems in much of the last (20th) century were little better than slaves. And they used call/response work songs in much the same way that the earlier plantation and riverboat landing slaves did. There is a wonderful book on this subject by Bruce Jackson called WAKE UP DEAD MAN - HARD LABOR AND SOUTHERN BLUES (University of Georgia, 1972). And there is a CD that goes with this called "Wake Up Dead Man - Black Convict Worksongs From Texas Prisons" (Rounder) which has some of the recordings that Jackson made back in the 1960's that form the basis of his book. Listening to these convict work songs, I was able to hear the form of call/response that Gibb has been talking about. It seems that there is a fairly direct line of descent here from the pre-Civil War plantation and and river slave songs down to the cotton-chopping, wood-cutting, and hammer songs of the prison chain gangs. And somewhere along in there, this kind of song went to sea.