Mama Me Wan Wuk (Mama I Want to Work)

DESCRIPTION: "Mama me wan' wuk" (3x). "Look how me muscle a jump" (2x). "Me wan fi dig ram hill" (3x). "Look how me muscle a jump" (2x)
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1981 (JamaicaFaithWorkPlay)
KEYWORDS: farming work nonballad worksong
FOUND IN: West Indies(Jamaica)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
ADDITIONAL: Olive Lewin, _Rock It Come Over - The Folk Music of Jamaica_ (Barbados: The University of the West Indies Press, 2000), pp. 104-105, "Mama Me Wan Wuk (I Want to Work)" (1 text, 1 tune)
RECORDINGS:
Cedric Gibson, Stephen Gibson, "Mumma Me Wan' Go Walk" (on JamaicaFaithWorkPlay)
NOTES [147 words]: The current description is Lewin's text.
In his liner notes to JamaicaFaithWorkPlay Roberts writes that "Mumma Me Wan' Go Walk" -- sung by two boys -- was "originally a digging song ... has become a children's play song under the influence od school and community efforts to preserve Jamaican traditional music." Lewin writes that the song is a mento ("relatively slow, in quadruple time, and its most characteristic feature is the accent in or on the last beat of each bar") and that "I have observed gangs of men swinging pickaxes during field labour and I can confirm the link between their movements and the accented fourth beat in mento. In order to effect a strong downward movement on the first beat of each bar in songs used to accompany this most common type of agricultural labour, there is an almost equally strong upward movement on the previous beat" (Lewin p. 104). - BS
Last updated in version 6.7
File: RcMaMWW

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