Waulking songs (òrain luaidh) were written acapella atop the rhythm of beating the cloth, building on the task's motion. I wanted to explore the technique, letting the beat lead the melody and lyric, as was the case when the waulking songs were created (Campbell & Collinson, 2018, Sarsfield, 2019). Initially, I struggled to create a beat within my DAW. I intended to use found sound (cafe sounds captured to invoke the frenetic energy of a previous job) but was left feeling unable to communicate a ‘work beat’ using this method. I attended a Hen Hoose production course in May, where I learned about using unconventional sounds and methods to assemble songs. It felt more authentic to use my guitar as the backbone of the song, one of my tools! The rhythm was created by palm muting my guitar whilst strumming, recording and then manipulating the sound via my DAW to sound more ‘industrial’. I wanted to create a muffled, mechanical, factory sound, repetitive and hollow. The pattern itself was influenced by the rhythm created in Dolly Parton’s National Association of Working Women inspired song “9 to 5” (Parton, 1980). Dolly created the rhythm with her acrylic nails, a very unconventional method but one which provided a prosody relevant to the working women she was representing in her music:

“When I actually wrote this song... I used my acrylic nails on the set when I

was writing it... because they make noise, and it sounded like a typewriter to me.” - Dolly Parton (2019).

I recorded the guitar into the DAW, and let it cycle as I vocalised along. An immediate melody emerged, which felt of the natural world. Often when commuting to Ayr I would hear the song of blackbirds at Prestwick station, and I believe this informed my melody. The Newhaven fishwives were described as a ‘basket of songbirds’, I thought about the domain which working women in the 1800s hadaccess to – the music they listened to would have been folk music, or the sounds of the natural world, informing their melodies and practice. ‘Worksong’ uses a lyrical humour and lightness to address the conflict between a stable career vs artistic pursuit. It reflects the immediate struggle for working class women in contemporary music to obtain the financial resources required to pursue a career in music (Bayton, 2006).

It follows the ‘call and response’ conversational structure of a waulking song and demonstrates my first attempt at ‘translating’ the style of working songs into pop-music artefacts. Organically created, rhythmically unconventional and melody led. I have begun to disseminate this song to my peers, in the hope that they will add on their own verses. I want to share the work as a Tiktok challenge, encouraging novice songwriters to ‘add another verse on’ in the empty sections. The purpose of this dissemination is to replicate the spontaneity of the verse creation in waulking songs, to encourage a sense of community and playfulness in songwriting, and to reestablish the practice of songwriting as an everyday activity, not just reserved for the mythological chosen few songwriters who channel the romantic idea of artists as uniquely gifted.