In almost every book you read about the French Revolution, La Carmagnole and Ça Ira are mentioned. They accompanied thousands of victims to the guillotine. Ça Ira (It will go!) was a popular dance which Marie Antoinette played on her clavecin. Little did she know that the same tune would be shouted by the infuriated mobs as she was driven through the streets of Paris in the tumbril to the guillotine!
The Italians show their natural love for opera by the fact that their national hymn is adopted from Bellini’s opera Somnambula.
The Rakoczy March of which you will hear later in the chapter is the Hungarian national hymn.
We could write an entire book on this subject, but this is only to give you a suggestion of how these songs grew and where they came from.
(5) Songs of Work and Labor and Trades
We have shown you the American Indians singing their songs as they fish and pound the corn; the boatmen rowing to the rhythm of their songs; and we have tried to show you that everybody loved songs as much when they worked as when they danced. Haven’t you, too, hummed or sung while working? People who accompany dish cloths and dusters with songs work better!
American negroes have used song to ease their work in the hot sunny fields. They not only sang, but men were hired to sing and act as song leaders in the slave days, to set the pace for workers, for more work was done when the slaves moved to the rhythm of music. In modern factories today, music is used to relieve the drudgery.
In Southern States the stevedores sing as they unload and load ships. And haven’t you often heard a rhythmic sound uttered by men hauling ropes on ships or buildings?
The world over, sailors have their songs and dances, farmers their reaping and planting songs, spinners and weavers their songs, boatmen songs like those on the Nile and the Volga boat song.
While few Greek folk songs have come down to our time, we know that they had songs for reaping the harvest, for grinding the barley, for threshing the wheat, for pressing the grapes, for spinning wool, and for weaving. They also had the songs of the shoemaker, the dyer, of the bath-master, the water carrier, of the shepherd, etc.