Labor Day weekend is here, with its big store sales, outdated admonitions to not wear white again until spring, local parades and union celebrations, cookouts, and barbeques. Though celebrating Labor Day on the first Monday in September became a tradition here in the U.S. to avoid an association with the global socialist celebration of May Day, it is nonetheless a celebration of work, workers, and a day off from work for people who are lucky enough to have a job with paid holidays. The U.S. Department of Labor details some of the holiday’s early history.
There is quite a bit of music associated with work, workers, and union movements; much of it has previously been highlighted here.
Today, let’s explore some of the popular rhythm and blues songs about occupations and jobs, or the lack of one. These are songs that I grew up with and danced to, that were not only popular in the Black community, but crossed over and became hits in the wider (and whiter) listening audience.
RELATED STORY: From coal mines to chain gangs and more: Black music tells the tales of Black workers
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music. With 170 stories (and counting) covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack, I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
One irony of Labor Day and its celebration for many Black folks: the checkered history of Black participation in the U.S. workforce after having been the major source of unpaid labor that built this nation during the many decades of enslavement. Black unemployment today is lower than it has ever been. However, black unemployment rates still aren’t as low as the white population’s.
Economist Tiffany N. Ford explored nearly 70 years of such data for the Brookings Institution in February.
Black women and men have worked in the United States of America long before national employment and unemployment data began being collected in 1940, but we can only directly track our unemployment experience back to 1972. This blog takes a step toward communicating what many may have already suspected: due to systematic exclusion and discrimination of Black people in the labor market, racism in the education system and throughout U.S. society, Black men and women have endured double the unemployment rates of white men and women since at least 1954.
Racialized and gendered inequality in employment and hiring is a form of oppression that Black people in the U.S. have yet to overcome. Still, it is important to advocate for policies which remove barriers to hiring, like discrimination based on prior criminal record, and ensure that Black workers have fair access to safe workplaces with equal pay where they are treated with dignity and respect. Because, as Derrick Bell asserts, “Continued struggle can bring about unexpected benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor. The fight in itself has meaning and should give us hope for the future.”
It’s no surprise that a top hit for the Black doo-wop group The Silhouettes in 1957 was “Get A Job.”
From Manny Mora’s YouTube video notes:
The lyrics of “Get a Job” are notable for the depiction of a household in tension because of unemployment, despite the man’s desperate attempts to find work, all delivered in a relentlessly upbeat style. A second release, “Heading for the Poorhouse”, continued the economic theme. It was one of the few songs to allude to inflation, the trip to the poorhouse being because “all our money turned brown”. This single and all their subsequent singles sold poorly and the group never entered the national charts again, making them a classic example of “one hit wonders”.
[…]“Get a Job” is one of the best known doo-wop songs of the 1950s. Recorded by The Silhouettes in October 1957, the song reached the number one spot on the Billboard pop and R&B singles charts in February 1958.
“When I was in the service in the early 1950s and didn’t come home and go to work, my mother said ‘get a job’ and basically that’s where the song came from,” said tenor Richard Lewis, who wrote the lyrics. The four members shared the credit, jointly creating the “sha na na” and “dip dip dip dip” hooks later imitated by other doo-wop groups.
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Sha-na na-na, sha-na na-na na (ba doo)
Sha-na na-na, sha-na na-na na (ba doo)
Sha-na na-na, sha-na na-na na (ba doo)
Sha-na na-na, sha-na na-na na, ba
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum, get a job
Sha-na na-na, sha-na na-na naEvery morning about this time
She get me out of my bed
A-crying get a jobAfter breakfast, everyday
She throws the want ads right my way
And never fails to say
Get a jobAnd then I go back to the house
Hear the woman’s mouth
(Preaching and a-crying
Tell me that I’m lying about a job
That I never could find)Well, when I get the paper
I read it through and through
And my girl never fails to say
If there is any work for meAnd then I go back to the house
I hear the woman’s mouth
(Preaching and a-crying
Tell me that I’m lying about a job
That I never could find)
Here’s a live performance on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” in 1958:
The group’s 1958 single, “Heading for the Poorhouse,” is relevant but much less well-known.
Motown’s The Miracles, with lead vocalist Smokey Robinson, recorded an answer to The Silhouettes’ hit. Paul Sexton wrote about it for UDiscoverMusic:
One of the great careers in soul music was launched on Smokey’s 18th birthday with an answer record.
Robinson’s fateful meeting with Berry Gordy Jr. in 1957 started a lifetime friendship and planted the seed of the Motown legend. Then Berry set about helping Smokey and the group of young hopefuls that he fronted, newly renamed the Miracles, to their first record deal. It was with End Records, and on Smokey’s 18th birthday in 1958, their debut single was issued.
So it was that one of the great careers in soul music was launched on that day by an answer record. Philadelphia R&B vocal group the Silhouettes had only entered the Hot 100 a month earlier with “Get A Job,” which made them the ultimate one-hit-wonders, with one chart entry ever, at No.1. Gordy, himself trying to unlock the door to a career in the music industry, recorded the Miracles’ joyful response, ‘Got A Job,’ and got it licensed to End. That label had been founded the year before by George Goldner.
“Got A Job” is uptempo and joyful, sure enough. But the lyrics paint an ugly portrait of both the menial job and the nasty boss.
Walked all day till my feet were tired
I was low, I just couldn’t get hired
So I sat in a grocery store
“Help is light & I need some more”(I got a job)
Sha na na na, sha na na na naWell, I fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly (got a job)
Sha na na na, sha na na na naYou’ve been houndin’ me to get a job
Well I finally did & my boss is a slob
He’s on my back really all day long
It seems like everything I do is wrongWell, I fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly (got a job)
Sha na na na, sha na na na na(He says to me)
“Get the boxes, take ’em to the basement
Do the job right or I’ll get a replacement
Get the mop & clean the dirty floors
& when you’re finished wipe the windows & the doors”I fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly (got a job)
Sha na na na, sha na na na naWell, this man’s about to drive me stone insane
One of these days I’m gonna have a fit
& though the boss keeps a-runnin’ through my brain
I’ll never (never) (never) (never) (never never quit my brand new job)Workin’ all day & workin’ all night & workin’ all day
In 1959, Motown’s Barrett Strong sang about the underlying pressures many folks were feeling. After all, jobs mean pay and pay is money!
Strong, who joined the ancestors on Jan. 28, would wind up in a battle with the label—over money, as NPR noted in his obituary.
Strong was born in West Point, Mississippi and moved to Detroit a few years later. He was a self-taught musician who learned piano without needing lessons and, with his sisters, formed a local gospel group, the Strong Singers. In his teens, he got to know such artists as Franklin, Smokey Robinson and Gordy, who was impressed with his writing and piano playing. “Money,” with its opening shout, “The best things in life are free/But you can give them to the birds and bees,” would, ironically, lead to a fight — over money.
Strong was initially listed among the writers and he often spoke of coming up with the pounding piano riff while jamming on Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” in the studio. But only decades later would he learn that Motown had since removed his name from the credits, costing him royalties for a popular standard covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many others and a keepsake on John Lennon’s home jukebox. Strong’s legal argument was weakened because he had taken so long to ask for his name to be reinstated. (Gordy is one of the song’s credited writers, and his lawyers contended Strong’s name only appeared because of a clerical error).
“Songs outlive people,” Strong told The New York Times in 2013. “The real reason Motown worked was the publishing. The records were just a vehicle to get the songs out there to the public. The real money is in the publishing, and if you have publishing, then hang on to it. That’s what it’s all about. If you give it away, you’re giving away your life, your legacy. Once you’re gone, those songs will still be playing.”
The Miracles sang about a lousy job, while in 1961, The Marvelettes sang a ditty about a postman, a coveted occupation for Black men, though not one without its struggles.
The U.S. Postal Service explores this history in “African-American postal workers in the 20th century.”
In 1947 Senator William Langer, chairman of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, ordered an investigation of allegations of racial discrimination in the hiring and promotion of employees at seven southern Post Offices. His special investigator found that African Americans – including honorably discharged veterans – were systematically denied appointments, promotions, and preferred assignments in Post Offices due solely to their race.[53]
African Americans also suffered disproportionately during the employee loyalty investigations that followed Truman’s Executive Order 9835 of March 22, 1947. Ashby Carter, president of the National Alliance of Postal Employees, noted that “the majority of dismissals under the loyalty act were aimed at getting rid of Negro postal employees who spoke out for democracy within the post office system”.[54]
Despite the hardships faced by applicants and employees, postal jobs were coveted positions. Although African Americans did not find equal opportunity in postal work – they were rarely promoted to supervisory positions, for example – they at least found opportunity, in an era when little was available in the private sector. In a 1939 survey of African-American adolescent boys in New York City, “Post Office clerk” topped the list of preferred jobs; “mail carrier” was number six on the 22-item list.[55] Many black postal employees were college students or graduates; some had law degrees but worked at the Post Office because white law firms would not hire them. One former postal worker recalled that in 1941 he sorted mail in Detroit with an African American who had his own law practice. The employee recalled that his coworker “would show up in court on days and come to the post office and work nights,” adding “that was pretty common.”[56] A study of African Americans in Chicago in the 1930s noted that:
“In the [Chicago] post office one will find not only colored high school graduates, but also men with advanced college degrees seeking economic security and students studying medicine and law. In 1939, at least a half-dozen Negro postal employees were writing books! The “postal worker” is a social type . . . of definitely high status”.[57]
Richard Wright, award-winning author of Native Son and Black Boy, worked as a clerk at the Chicago Post Office sporadically from 1928 through the mid-1930s, before leaving to pursue a writing career in New York City.[58]
Here are The Marvelettes, performing “Please Mr. Postman.”
From Classic Hits Studio’s YouTube notes:
Please Mr. Postman was the Marvelettes’ first single and their only #1 hit. The Marvelettes were five teenage girls from Inkster, Michigan, and they went through many member changes before breaking up in 1969. When they recorded this song, it was the first time they had ever been in a recording studio. Their singing experience was in choirs and glee clubs. They got some help from Florence Ballard, who was a member of another Motown girl group, The Supremes.
When The Marvelettes auditioned for Motown, the label didn’t have their full songwriting machinery in place, so they asked the girls to bring in material. William Garrett, a songwriter friend of group member Georgia Dobbins, offered this to The Marvelettes when she asked if he had anything for them to sing. He wrote it as a blues song, but Dobbins completely rewrote it (she saved only the title) and taught it to lead singer Gladys Horton.
Before The Marvelettes recorded it, Dobbins left the group to care for her mother.
While working for the post office was a coveted job for Black men, Black women had fewer options to work outside of the home; domestic service was their norm. However, when thinking of Mary Wells’ Motown song “Operator,” I grew curious about the history of women “manning the phones.”
As the number of telephones in the U.S. multiplied, so did the demand for operators. In 1910, there were 88,000 female telephone operators in the United States. By 1920, there were 178,000, and by 1930, 235,000.
As their numbers grew, women operators became a powerful force—for workers’ rights and even serving overseas in WWI.
[…]With the coming of the 1930s, technology that allowed telephone users simply to dial another phone without the aid of an operator had become widespread. Phone companies took advantage of the moment to slash their workforces, and thousands of operators lost their jobs. By 1940, there were fewer than 200,000 in all.
However, most of those operators were white. In 2020, former newspaper columnist Shirlee Smith wrote for LAist about her experience applying for an operator job at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a Black woman in 1956.
I’d landed this job in a most unusual way.
My previous employer was Pacific Bell; I had been trained by them as a long-distance operator.
When I applied to work at Cedars of Lebanon, I’d simply called the hospital and asked to speak with the Telephone Chief Operator. Once she was on the line, I explained that I was hoping they had an opening on their switchboard, and I quickly let her know that my previous employer was Pacific Bell.
Whammo!
Hired on the spot — on the telephone. To be a Ma Bell switchboard operator back then was the top of the telephone operator game.
Then she showed up, and they saw she wasn’t white. Guess what came next.
“We have a clerk typist job for you,” [the receptionist] said.
“No, I’m already hired as a switchboard operator. I start next…”
She stood up and leaned toward me, while at the same time abruptly cutting me off from explaining why I was there.
“No,” she said emphatically, then: “We don’t hire colored girls to work our switchboard.”
Mary Wells’ “Operator” was the B-side of her 1962 hit “Two Lovers.” Wells wasn’t the only Motown songstress to record it; it was also covered by Brenda Holloway in 1965.
From Wells’ biography at BlackPast:
Legendary composer, singer, lyricist Mary Wells was born Mary Esther Wells on May 13, 1943, in Detroit, Michigan to Arthur Wells and Geneva Campbell Wells. Her brothers were Thomas and Fletcher. When she was two years old, Wells was diagnosed with spinal meningitis and partial paralysis. She was visually and hearing impaired. At the age of 10, Wells tested positive for tuberculosis. She did regain her health and was able to function adequately and began singing in local clubs and played the clarinet.
Wells graduated from Northwest High School in Detroit in 1960. Weeks later. she married R&B-blues singer, conductor, and dancer Herman Lewis Griffin from Selma, Alabama. Later that year she signed with and performed for the first time at Tamla Records, a division of Motown Records. Her first single composition was “Bye Bye Baby” which peaked at # 8 on the Billboard R&B chart and # 45 on the single pop chart in 1961. That same year, Wells signed a contract with the Motown record label. In 1962, she released “The One Who Loves You,” a single that made # 2 on the R&B chart and # 8 on Hot 100. Also, her single “Two Lovers” hit the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at # 7, thus becoming Wells’ second # 1 hit on the R&B chart. More than one million copies were sold, earning her a gold disc.
Check out Holloway’s 1965 version.
Which one do you prefer?
Here’s a bit of Holloway’s story, from her Concord Records artist page:
Holloway was born on June 21, 1946 in Atascadero, California and moved with her family to the Watts section of Los Angeles at age two. “We were very, very poor, but my mother always had a home,” recalls the singer, a 1999 winner of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s prestigious Pioneer Award. “We lived by the projects, but we were in a house. I was in the ghetto studying violin in my backyard. The dogs were howling and I was playing.” Young Brenda also developed the diamond diction that would become a hallmark of her vocal style.
[…]In 1964, singing along to a Mary Wells record while wearing a form-fitting dress that highlighted her fashion-model figure, 18-year-old Brenda caught the eyes and ears of Berry Gordy, Jr. at a disc jockey convention in Southern California. She became the first West Coast artist signed by Gordy’s Detroit-based Motown empire. Her first record for Motown’s Tamla label, the heart-tugging ballad “Every Little Bit Hurts,” was recorded in L.A. with Hal Davis and Marc Gordon producing. It was her biggest hit, peaking at No. 12 on Billboard’s pop chart and helping her land a coveted opening slot on the Beatles’ 1965 U.S. tour.
Holloway was soon traveling to Detroit to record. Although she worked with some of the company’s top producers, including Smokey Robinson (“When I’m Gone,” “Operator”) and Gordy himself (“You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”), she felt that as an out-of-town artist she was not always given the best material. And stardom wasn’t coming as quickly as she’d anticipated. “I was young,” she admits. “I didn’t understand. Didn’t have any patience. Berry was working with me. When he got me ready for Vegas, that scared me.”
Moving away from Motown and heading south to Louisiana, one of the biggest R&B songs about work was a 1966 hit song by Lee Dorsey, written by legendary New Orleans musician, songwriter, arranger, and record producer Allen Toussaint.
Paul Kauppila wrote about Dorsey for 64 Parishes.
Vocalist Lee Dorsey recorded some of the biggest rhythm and blues hits of the 1960s.
Born Irving Lee Dorsey on December 24, 1924 (some sources say 1926) in New Orleans, Dorsey and his family moved to Portland, Oregon, when he was ten years old. While serving on a US Navy destroyer during World War II (1939–1945), Dorsey was injured when a Japanese fighter plane attacked his ship. After leaving the military, Dorsey began a career as a lightweight/featherweight boxer nicknamed “Kid Chocolate,” who remained undefeated when he retired from the sport in 1955. That same year he returned to New Orleans and learned auto body repair with funding provided by the G.I. Bill.
In 1957, Dorsey was working at a body shop owned by local DJ “Ernie the Whip” when talent scout Reynauld Richard heard him singing and invited Dorsey to Cosimo Matassa’s recording studio that evening. The result was Dorsey’s first single, “Rock Pretty Baby,” released on the Rex label. The single was successful enough to earn Dorsey a trip back to the studio to record “Lottie Mo” for local producer Joe Banashak’s Instant label. The record featured a young Allen Toussaint on piano; it was an association that would prove fruitful for both men.
[…]Toussaint, meanwhile, had entered the US Army in 1963. Upon his discharge in 1965, Marshall Sehorn invited Toussaint to record a four-song session with Dorsey, hoping to revitalize Dorsey’s career. “Ride Your Pony,” which featured gunshot sound effects (likely influenced by Junior Walker’s hit “Shotgun” from just a few months earlier), reached #7 on the R&B charts and #28 on the pop charts in 1965. The year 1966 marked the peak of Dorsey’s success. Three singles from that year, “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” “Working in the Coal Mine,” and “Holy Cow” all made the R&B Top Ten list, though it was “Working in the Coal Mine,” with its clanking sound effects and Dorsey’s comic complaints about his job, that became his signature song.
Workin’ in the coal mine
Goin’ down, down, downWorkin’ in a coal mine
Oops, about to slip downFive o’clock in the mornin’
I’m already up and gone
Lord, I’m so tired
How long can this go on?‘Course I make a little money
Haulin’ coal by the ton
But when Saturday rolls around
I’m too tired for havin’ fun
Moving into the ‘70s, the Isley Brothers scored a hit with “Work To Do” in 1972, on their T-Neck label.
Formed in the mid-’50s as a teenage gospel quartet by the eldest four Isley Brothers (O’Kelly, Rudolph, Ronald and Vernon), the original configuration of the group quit performing when Vernon was tragically killed at age 13 when riding his bike. In 1957, at the urging of their parents, the remaining three brothers moved to New York City to make it as a rock ’n’ roll band, and the first song they wrote together was “Shout!” — a massive smash that had multiple lives thanks to its inclusion on the Animal House soundtrack and is probably playing at an event near you, right now.
From that first single and album in 1959, the Isley Brothers repeatedly redefined what their music was and what it was called, and dominated the black music charts like no band before or since. The Isley Brothers can count both Jimi Hendrix (who toured as their backing guitarist in the early ‘60s) and Elton John (whose band backed the Isleys up in the U.K.) as backing musicians, and have arguably the most legendary run of albums in R&B history. After early rock ‘n’ roll success, and an incredible detour with Berry Gordy and his Motown Records (two albums, including This Old Heart of Mine), the band released all of their albums independently on their own T-Neck Records, reinventing R&B over and over again in the process.
I’m taking care of business, baby can’t you see
I gotta make it for you, and I gotta make it for me
Sometimes it may seem girl I’m neglecting you
I’d love to spend more time
But I got so many things to doOoh, I got work to do, I got work baby
I got a job yeah I got work to do,
Said I got work to doOh I’m out here trying to make it, baby can’t you see
It takes a lot of money to make, it let’s talk truthfully
So keep your love light burning
And a little food hot in my plate
You might as well get used to me coming home a little late, ohOoh, I got work to do, I got work baby
I got a job, yeah I got work to do
I got work to do, everybody’s got work to do
Interestingly, “Work To Do” also became a hit for the Scottish Average White Band in 1974.
Hope you have some time off from work this weekend to listen to more great tunes. Be sure to post some of your favorite work-related songs in the comments!
Denise Oliver Velez
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