At our desk on a Friday morning, everyone knows it's pure theater. No one can do a stitch of paperwork and e-mails can barely be checked, although the coffee pot can be drained at infinity. The trick is to punch the plastic keys of the keyboard louder and quicker than ever, even though it is only with one hand and eyes are closed and the better part of the morning will be spent calling around to check if everyone feels as bad. Though born of laziness, this is really a subtle act of subversion. In 1929 Bessie Brown, a stage singer, recorded this jazzed-up funeral march about sharecropping cotton fields. It was her last recording session with the Brunswick label, and decided to drop away from her previous pop-romance material to get a few things off her chest. At the time, minstrel shows still held sold-out performances, audiences nostalgic for the “southern days of grandeur,” grand for white people anyway. Knowing that there was a demand for field songs, Brown wrote this derisive tune about how the hands sing so the boss thinks them happy when in fact the singers know there'll be no rest until old age. She does so with such an upbeat punch that she herself could be a minstrel. The fact that she is clearly a black woman, restrained to mostly singing ballads or “jungle” numbers, makes this number drip with accusation. The white theater folk pay to see an old-timey show and have Brown standing before them, in 1929, telling them: You are thieves and you're working me into the grave. Then the snappy chorus: “All my life / I've been making it / All my life / White folks takin' it.” No matter where we work, whom we work for or what race we are, white folks are still taking all of our money. That's why we take two-hour lunches and don't eat anything.