The Erie Canal is a typical example of a worksong. This is a type of folksong specifically used to entertain during and/or to enable physical labour. These songs can be broken into several categories, such as those sung at harvest time, by different craftsmen, or by sailors.
The Erie Canal would have been sung by canallers and towpath boys working the mule-drawn boats which traveled the US canals in the nineteenth century. Several versions of the song, traditionally sung to a variety of tunes, have been collected in the Folksong Archives of the American Library of Congress.
Verses were remembered by people as diverse as a new York professor, who recalled hearing it in childhood, a Rio Grande cattleman, and a Seattle lawyer, who had sung it as a towpath boy out of Buffalo in the 1870s.
Worksongs had essentially practical functions. They set a basic rhythm and tempo for communal or individual tasks, such as field work or spinning and weaving. They passed on information about how a task should be done, often in easily-memorable rhyme. And, as in the case of the canallers, and in cowboy songs, they helped keep the singers awake during night shifts.
Indeed, The Erie Canal may have been one of the very songs which drove the people of Albany to take an action against the canallers in 1835, on the grounds that their singing was keeping respectable residents awake at all hours.
Go to the AcademyΓÇÖs Concert Hall to hear Thomas Hampson singing a recital version of The Erie Canal.
