This volume is an interpretive analysis of a collection of 335 song texts treated as primary historical sources. The collection highlights the cultural practices that link music with labor in Sukuma communities in northwestern Tanzania. These linkages are evident in the music of the elephant, snake, and porcupine hunting associations that flourished in the precolonial epoch, in the nineteenth-century regional and long-distance porter associations, and in the farmer associations that have proliferated since the beginning of the twentieth century. Acting primarily as an interpretive editor, the author collaborated with several Tanzanian scholars and translators towards fine-tuning the translation of these texts into English, and gathered testimonies in order to create succinct interpretive statements about the songs.
The African Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology is pleased to announce that the 2012 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize has been awarded to Frank Gunderson for his book, Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania: "We Never Sleep, We Dream of Farming, published by Brill in 2010. Grounded in nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, we congratulate Professor Gunderson for this excellent publication in African music studies
