I recognized a paraphrase from something I had written, and thought, hmmm...then realized I had put more or less the same thing in the article on Wikipedia:

The fact that Euro-American observers found African work-singers so remarkable (as can be gleaned from the tone of their descriptions) suggests that work songs were indeed rather foreign to their culture. Such references begin to appear in the late 18th century, whence one can see the cliché develop that Black Africans "could not" work without singing. For example, an observer in Martinique in 1806 wrote, "The negroes have a different air and words for every kind of labour; sometimes they sing, and their motions, even while cultivating the ground, keep time to the music." So while the depth of the African-American work song traditions is now recognized, in the early 19th century they stood in stark contrast to the paucity of such traditions among Euro-Americans.

Use of this idea, however, seems a bit incongruous with another part of the programme saying chanties were there in Ancient Greece, etc etc.

I might note also, among many other things, that the part about Northeast England's L.A. Smith being a great collector and the dramatic quote from her _THE Music of the Waters_ felt "off". The passage was just Smith plagiarizing from two American periodicals (The Atlantic Monthly, 1858, and Harper's, 1882). It made it seem like she had been through this amazing experience on a ship when in reality she collected no more than 14 of the chanties (out of a total of 50+) in Sailor Homes in the Northeast. This certainly is not obvious, nonetheless the way Smith was used as a sort of character of an intrepid British song collector felt silly.