1 “In many of the places I’ve worked, music has been there as a soundtrack to help the employees get through their day.”
In the 1970s (some years before my chef’s job at Sambo’s), I worked as a dishwasher at Scoma’s, a seafood restaurant in Sausalito, California. There, we often listened to the song “Hard Work” by John Handy. The manager would play it every night at the beginning of the shift as we all scurried to make the restaurant ready for the frenzied, every-night-a-capacity-crowd dinner rush. The stress of getting all the food prepared, pots and pans clean and oiled, tables set, menus printed, and so on, was greatly relieved by music that the manager piped throughout the back room and entire restaurant over the PA. When this song came on, people’s tense shoulders would drop an inch, their footsteps become lighter, their actions become more fluid and graceful. The heavy beat of the song and its I-bVII vamp give it a sense of gravity, but the performance is so jovial and ebullient that it feels almost heliumlike in its ability to elevate drudgery and tension to purposefulness and a confidence that everything will work out right. So many songs with vamps set up a groove that in turn conveys a sense of timelessness—we forget about the clock and feel that if something goes wrong, no problem—we can just do it over again. Any thoughts that we may run out of time are vanquished by the alternate universe of the song, where the beat is marked at regular, rhythmic intervals and the song moves unflinchingly forward, but ordinary “world time” seems to stand still.
Handy, J. (1976). Hard work. On Hard Work [LP]. Impulse! Records
2 “Mothers from every culture sing to their infants.”
For more on the evolution of behavior, see the excellent books by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Hrdy, S. B. (1981). The Woman That Never Evolved. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———. (1981). Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon.
3 “… ‘God Bless America.’”
Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant from Siberia, wrote the song in 1918. In 1938 he revised it, and it was reintroduced on Armistice Day that year, sung by Kate Smith. There have been movements over the years to adopt it officially as America’s national anthem. Woody Guthrie reportedly wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as a musical reply to “God Bless America.” ASCAP, the composers’ rights agency, reports that “God Bless America” was by far the most played song in the months following 9/11.
4 “Sorrow does have an evolutionary purpose …”
Brean, J. (December 8, 2007). Chemicals play key role in a person’s appreciation of sad music, expert says. [Electronic version]. National Post. Retrieved March 5, 2008, from http://www.nationalpost.com/Story.html?id=154661.