…so you better treat her right. So sang disco diva Donna Summer in 1983. Were truer words ever sung, or spoken? Doubtful. But yet the catalog of music generally identified as work songs chronicles the labors of men, expressed in a distinctly masculine voice.

Case in point: Woody Guthrie’s stirring 1940 “Union Maid” culminates with his advice to “gals who want to be free”: marry a Union man. Look for the Union Label, the anthem of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), was written by ad executive Paula Green in 1975 for women’s voices, representing the hundreds of unionized garment factory workers who were often immigrant women. Another rare exception is a song called Winter Sun, a grim yet weirdly sweet Scottish song by Gill Bowman about a widowed woman who must work in the coal mines to feed her children, based on a first-person, 1837 account from Lochgelly, Fife. The source of the account, named Archibald Cook, tells the story of his grandmother, from the time when women and children worked underground alongside their men from an early age. The men hewed the coal, and the women carried it to the surface in large baskets on their backs. The most haunting aspect: fearing combustion from an open flame, the miners worked in virtual darkness, illuminated only slightly by the ghostly, ghastly microbial glow of—wait for it—fish heads. Aye, lassie.

The Scottish tradition also contains a few other memorable examples, notably songs of fisher-lassies and the “Song of the Fishgutters,” about women from northeastern Scotland who followed the herring catch to the English port of Yarmouth, to gut, salt and pack the fish into barrels, written by Ewan MacColl. Another contemporary example is “Shift and Spin,” often sung a capella by the song’s author, Ewan McVicar. The song documents the tedium of working in a textile mill, and although the song is written about the women who work there, the POV is decidedly, and a bit condescendingly, male:

Shift and spin, warp and twine
Making thread coarse and fine
Dreamin’ o’ yer valentine
Workin’ in the mill.

Keep yer bobbins runnin’ easy
Show ye’re gallus, bright and breezy
Waitin’ till Prince Charmin’ sees ye
Workin’ in the mill.

In his Wee Gallus Bloke, McVicar also writes and sings in Glesga —Glaswegian– about girls, “gallus molls,” leaving their shift at the “sweetie works” (candy factory) in their stylish “flashy-dashy petticoats and flashy-dashy shawls,” obviously proud to earn and purchase for themselves. Again, while mostly sympathetic, the song expresses a male point of view, similar in spirit to the Rolling Stone’s bleak but charming “Factory Girl.”

Sure, we give props to Molly Malone, who wheeled her wheel-barrow through streets broad and narrow, crying “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh” in the song that has become Dublin’s unofficial anthem, even if some versions of her legend suggest that she proffered a different sort of delicacy on the city streets by night. (Hey—a girl’s gotta make a living.)

And yes, we love Patricia Maguire’s spunky cover of Norma Jean’s Truck Driving Woman, but let’s keep it real: this song’s still as much of a novelty number as was the case in 1968 when Norma Jean (Beasler) released the original on The Porter Wagoner Show. In the verses of “John Henry,” we learn that the “little woman” Polly Anne drove steel like a man when the song’s macho namesake took sick. But women’s work rarely makes it into the Great American Songbook, with a nod to the Roches, whose comically plaintive Mr. Sellack takes on a nearly masochistic tone with the pleading promise that the speaker will “…get down on my knees and scrub…behind…the…steam-table.” This song, like “Truck-Driving Woman,” stands out as a rare instance where women write and sing about their own work experience.

Work songs from the American tradition include whaler’s sea-chanteys, railroad ditties, night-herding cowboy musings of ridin’ and ropin,’ prison chain-gang songs, logger’s and lumberjack songs, coal-miner’s laments, field hollers from the cotton-fields and levees of the American South. By the 1960s, middle-class suburban folkies from Forest Hills and beyond sang about working all day for the sugar in their “tay” (from Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill), or the heartless mill-bosses who’d “..take the nickels off a dead man’s eyes / To buy a Coca-Cola and an Eskimo Pie” (from Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues), as righteously, though humorously out of touch with the rugged source-material as the character Virgil Starkwell played by Woody Allen in his 1969 classic “Take the Money and Run.”

The American work song is typically the voice of vigorous and treacherous physical labor, most of which is long-gone from our daily reality, as chronicled by decades of Springsteen rust-belt dirges. From the mid- 20^thcentury forward, McJobs in offices replaced the pick-swinging and rope-pulling of prior centuries. Does any employee sitting in a call-center or a dental office burst into a spontaneous rendition of Dolly Parton’s 1980 ”9 to 5,” or Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s 1973 “Takin’ Care of Business,” or Johnny Paycheck’s 1977 version of “Take This Job and Shove It”? If so, an immediate call from human resources would no doubt follow.

The absence of woman-written work songs is hardly a mystery. In decades past, although some women undoubtedly labored in a variety of menial settings as did the men, women were far less likely to retire to the pubs where songs were written and sung until daybreak, social mores being what they were. And most women of, say, a century ago had more than enough work in their own homes to devour their time, focused on housework and childcare. Songs did arise from these centuries of unpaid drudgery: laments along the lines of “I Wish I was Single Again,” and the lullaby. One of the most crushingly sad is the “Housewife’s Lament” circa 1850-1900, which concludes “There’s nothing that lasts us but troubles and dirt.” The sheet-music from the period suggests that this be sung “matter-of-factly.” Indeed.

Anyone who has hopelessly cradled and rocked a colicky baby at 2 AM who will NOT stop wailing has probably secretly wished for a song that would suffice as a magic spell, wishing for blessed silence broken only by the tiny, purling snore of the newborn. Like work songs from the fields and factories, including “waulking” songs from Scotland where women sang in a syncopated form as they beat newly woven wool tweed to soften the fabric, and the “segadinhas” or wheat-threshing women’s songs from northern Portugal, lullabies rely on steady, repetitious rhythm. Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans” comes to mind:

Mothers with their babes asleep
Are rockin’ to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

The simplest lullabies lack lyrics altogether, since infants lack vocabulary. Common elements in lullabies, regardless of language or cultural origin, tend to feature simple notes and a slow cadence suggesting a calm maternal heartbeat. Consider the sound of the 14^th century CE Lebanese children’s song, Ughniyah li-at-Atfal : The tone may seem more chant-like than melodic to western ears, but the drone element may also be considered soporific. The Icelandic Budar rei lofti is more European-sounding, especially when the female singer’s voice ascends into the upper register.

And consider Ayub Ogada’s ethereal Kothbiro,  where the singer warns that rain is on its way, calling to the children to bring the cattle home to safety. Sung in Dholuo, the language of the Luo people of Western Kenya, literal translation of the lyric is not needed to feel the cooling, calming, hypnotic quality of this song adapted from a traditional folkloric source. Adding to the luminous quality of this lullaby is the fact that Ayub accompanies himself on the nyatiti lyre, which is culturally considered in Kenya to be a woman, exuding feminine and mothering energies.

But it’s not all snuggles and cuddles and starlight, star bright. Many of our familiar English-language lullabies contain surprisingly complex elements, including thinly veiled protest against hardship, poverty, domestic injustice.  Many lullabies include attempts at negotiation with a fussy child, as in “Come Up Horsey, Hey, Hey.”  The melody is composed of only a handful of notes. Many variants on this theme exist, especially the anonymous nursery rhyme “Hush Little Baby,” beginning with the lines:

Hush little baby, don’t say a word,
Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.
And if that diamond ring turns brass,
Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Mama’s gonna buy you a billy-goat.

While the origins of the song are unclear – versions were collected in Virginia and North Carolina at the turn of the 20^th century – it’s unlikely that the singer-narrator actually possessed a diamond ring to offer as bribe or barter, entering a note of irony into the lyric. The singer, usually a mother, may simply be at her wit’s end, and is desperately grasping at any notion that will lull her child to sleep.

Another familiar bedtime song, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” is believed by some folklorists, notably Lyn Ellen Lacy, to be African American in origin. The version we sing today is a sanitized edition. In the book “American Ballads and Folksongs” by Alan Lomax, the lullaby contains these disturbing verses:

Way down yonder, In de medder,
There’s a po’ lil lambie,
De bees an’ de butterflies,
Peckin’ out its eyes, De po’ lil lambie cried, “Mammy!

Another version contains the chilling lyric, “Buzzards and flies / Picking out its eyes / Pore little baby crying,” suggesting that the lyrics “po’ lil lambie cried, ‘Mammy'” is in reference to the slaves who were often separated from their own families in order to serve their owners. In 1925, Oxford scholar Dorothy Scarborough, who also held a PhD from Columbia University, explored this song in her book “On the Trail of Negro Folksongs,” and cited formerly enslaved Black Americans as the sources. More contemporary ethnomusicologists also conjecture that “Hush Littlle Baby” also bears the deep imprint of slavery and persistent racial injustice in the American South, reasoning that the woman promising a crying child a diamond ring, expensive looking-glass and other costly bribes is in fact an enslaved Black woman singing to her master’s child, not her own.

Many lullabies contain a note of dread from a different source, mirroring the reality of high infant mortality which, almost inconceivably, remains a fact of maternal experience in America today. Many English-language lullabies are cautionary tales, and contain haunting references to baby falling from a tree-top (“When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall / And down will come baby, cradle and all”) , or sailing away into the ether—the chorus gently pleading:

Sail baby sail,
Out across the sea,
Only don’t forget to sail
Back again to me.

An especially dark psychological interpretation suggests that some lullabies contain coded hints of maternal anger toward the endlessly demanding child (or multiple children, more likely) who deplete the mother-singer (“When I was single, I used to dress so fine,  Now that I’m married, I go ragged all the time”).

Even the gentle-sounding Go to Sleep You Little Baby as sung by Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch and Emmy Lou Harris in the Coen Brothers’ classic “Oh, Brother Where Art Thou” hides heartbreak and even horror beneath its seductive aural sweetness. The lyric describes parents who are “long-gone in the cotton and corn,” and a perhaps-wanton mother who abandons her child outright: “…she’s long-gone, with her red shoes on, / Didn’t leave nothin’ but the baby.” After assuring the child that “…you and me and the Devil makes three,” the singer asks, “Come lay your bones / On the alabaster stones, / And be my ever-lovin’ baby.”  In this deceptively complex song of minimal notes, the only lasting bond is death.

Is it reasonable to wonder if the lullaby as an art form has been the only safe outlet for centuries of women’s silenced suffering? Fatigue and frustration flood through so many of these immensely hummable, memorable tunes. Perhaps mothers and other caregivers would be safest to turn to synthetic white-noise and womb-sound audio, or maybe mostly Mozart when easing their little ones into dreamland.

But never to be outdone, there’s “Baby Mine” written by Frank Churchill, with lyrics by Ned Washington, the full-blown tear-jerker from the iconic 1941 animated Disney classic, Dumbo. Here, with the usual unerring Disney precision, the pain of separation-anxiety cuts to the bone: Mama elephant has been imprisoned for defending her big-eared offspring from bullying attacks and reaches through the bars of her cell to pat, rock and comfort her heartbroken child although she cannot see him. More recently, Bonnie Raitt and Was (Not Was) cut a tangy, twangy cover for the “Stay Awake” 1988 Disney Tribute album.

We chatted about the song recently with Los Angeles-based jazz percussionist Matt Johnson who, among other musical adventures, leads The New Jet Set, a sleek jazz combo that unapologetically swings. Johnson frequently includes an instrumental version of “Baby Mine” in his generally upbeat sets, with the video clip running in the background.

Johnson says, “From a technical point of view, the song literally rocks, but obviously not in the rock-and-roll sense. The contrapuntal tempo is easy, even a bit lumbering, like an soft elephant-walk, or like the mother elephant softly swaying and rocking baby Dumbo. The simplicity of the arrangement does mirror a lullaby. It’s not hard to sing.” Johnson adds, “This song is an example of that undeniable Disney emotional genius. People who remember the movie of course get misty, but it affects young people the same way.  The song, with that imagery, well…there usually isn’t a dry eye in the house, and I will say that I myself have to keep my back to the movie screen when we play it.”