Here are a couple of odes to work to listen to as the summer winds down.
What makes good work music?
Curated by the Alliance for American Manufacturing staff, we’ve put together a select playlist of songs that pull on factory work for their inspiration. And now for some explanation into what guided our picks:
Are the lyrical contents of these songs all about factory work, all of the time? No! In fact some don’t at all. One even draws its inspiration from the sonic side of things, meaning the sounds of industrial settings are an obvious influence. There’s even an entire genre of music dedicated to this.
And lastly: We left off at last half a dozen Bruce Springsteen songs. Had to cut off the boss.
You can find the entire playlist here on YouTube, but here’s a selection of a few of them:
Alabama – “40 Hour Week (For a Livin’)”
Alabama was a huge country act in the 1980s, and “40 Hour Week” was one of its many chart toppers. Country music historian Bill Malone once called it “a rare country music tribute to American workers that “probably owes its popularity as much to its patriotic sentiments as to its social concern” and that the song was set apart because “almost no one in country music has spoken for the industrial laborer.”
Huey Lewis & The News – “Workin for a Livin”
With lyrics like, “Damned if you do / Damned if you don’t / I’m supposed to get a raise next week / You know damn well I won’t,” this tapped right into the frustrations of the average worker in the 1980’s when it came out (and probably still resonates).
Dolly Parton – “9 to 5”
No list like this would be complete without this classic ode to work. I mean come on.
Drive-By Truckers – “21st Century USA”
One of the frontmen of Drive-By Truckers wrote this song at a rest stop near Gillette, Wyoming while on tour, using the environs as a stand-in for the economic reality he sees in a lot of American communities. “In a town that’s named for razor blades / All-American but Chinese-made / Folks workin’ hard for shrinkin’ pay / 21st century USA,” goes the first refrain.
Iggy Pop – “Mass Production”
Iggy made some classic albums in the 1970s, and this is on one of them. “Mass Production” not only has lyrics about working on the line, the song also has the monotonous feel of a machine in motion – a fine example of the kind of music he and David Bowie were producing at the time.
Rush – “Working Man”
Everybody will probably say “Tom Sawyer” is their most famous track, but the one that made Canadian export Rush famous in the United States is “Working Man.” That happened after an Ohio disc jockey started regularly playing it. “As soon as I dropped the needle on ‘Working Man,’ I knew this was a perfect record for Cleveland,” Donna Halper told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer in 2011.
Bobby Bare – “The Streets of Baltimore”
This song describes a couple that migrates to a northern city for opportunity (the narrator gets a good factory job and is able to buy a house), but they grow apart, leading to heartbreak. As described by an AAM colleague: It paints a picture of “a very different Baltimore” than the one that exists today. “But see what having manufacturing in a city can do? And what happens when it all goes away?”