Entry · catalog no. 4304
field holler
/ /fiːld ˈhɑː.lɚ/ /feeld HOL-ur
noun · Southern United States · 1800s
✓ Verified
1.
A solo vocal cry sung by an enslaved field worker, and later by imprisoned and tenant laborers — a long, free-rhythmed call carrying moans, whoops, and bent notes across an open field. Not a group work song but one voice, sounding for itself.
“You could hear a field holler roll clear across the bottom, one man's voice and nothing else.”
Origin & Attribution
Enslaved Africans and their descendants in the American South, from the 1700s and 1800s, adapting West African vocal traditions to the isolation of tasked field labor. The holler's bent notes, melisma, and free rhythm feed straight into the blues, the spiritual, and everything downstream — one of the oldest sounds in African American music, sung long before anyone was allowed to write it down.
1800s
Sung in Southern fields under slavery
1930s
Recorded by John and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress
1993
Named a birthplace of the blues in Lomax's account
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Southern United States · 1800s
Spoken by
Enslaved and later imprisoned and tenant field laborers
$FIELDHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady226 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1800
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
John A. & Alan Lomax, Library of Congress field recordings
1930s
■
+ Cite a sourceAlan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began
1993
See also