I’VE always argued that jazz grew and bloomed out of multiple acts of work. 

The great blues singers like Bessie Smith (Washwoman’s Blues) or Big Bill Broonzy (Plowman’s Blues) sang about their aversion to alienating forms of labour, and some of the earliest jazz recordings invoked hard-working lives, including New Orleans pioneers Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet in Coal Cart Blues — where Armstrong sings of his boyhood hard labours of hauling sacks of coal — or trumpeter Freddie Keppard’s Chicago cattle abattoir narrative, Stockyard Strut, or Joe “King” Oliver’s paean to all Windy City workers, Working Man Blues.

Even early Duke Ellington tracks like Stevedore Stomp told of the travails of Harlem-based dockworkers.