How to Use work song in a Sentence
work song
noun-
In the cotton rows, Willie and Bobbie heard work songs and blues.
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Alex Abramovich,
New Yorker,
22 Dec. 2025
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Freedom songs rang out alongside work songs, a player on homemade pan pipes mesmerized listeners alongside the generation’s greatest future singer-songwriters.
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Andy Greene,
Rolling Stone,
6 Nov. 2025
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Sonically, the genre is indebted to blues and gospel music, but echoes of other kinds of Black music—like work songs, string and jug band music, Black vaudeville, boogie-woogie, and even minstrelsy—can be heard in it.
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Literary Hub,
17 Feb. 2026
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This was a work song preserved by the folklorist Alan Lomax, who recorded thousands of vernacular American performances for the Library of Congress.
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Iqbal Akhtar,
The Conversation,
30 June 2026
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Blues developed after the Civil War (1861–65) and was influenced by 19th-century work songs and field hollers, minstrel show music, ragtime, and church music such as spirituals and hymns, as well as the folk and popular music of white Southerners.
—
René Ostberg,
Encyclopedia Britannica,
15 May 2026
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'work song.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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