with improvisational and trivial lyrics. It certainly does support the idea that call-and-response rowing songs were not native to Britain and were presumably an African holdover. One can move plausibly from African call-and-reponse work songs to New World call-and-response rowing songs to cotton-screwers' chants to halliard shanties. More descriptions from the decades before I allege the "new chanties" came in. The first reference is not very insightful re: chanties, however, such early references to African-Americans singing during work are hard to locate, so I give it FWIW. It comes from "Abridgment of the Minutes of the Evidence Taken Before a Committee of the Whole House," including depositions from 1789. In one passage, the following bits of info are given with respect to African slaves working sugar cane fields in Grenada. The cutting of canes is not very hard, tying them easy; the feeding the mills and sires are the most laborious. The rest of the work is very easy. On the whole, thinks the negroes are most healthy in, and like the crop best. Never knew them complain of work then. The mill- gang commonly sing all night. Certainly labour in crop is the hardest, as 1/2 their time, out of crop, is weeding. Holing is the most severe work out of crop. ...They often give holers weak grog twice a-day. Holing does not occasion sickness. Negroes seem fox'd of it, and commonly sing at at. Of course, the assumption that the slaves were having fun --more so because they