Drawn from fieldwork in northern Haiti in 1937, this collection presents coumbite and bal songs in the original with English translations and enough commentary to make their occasions legible. The coumbite is a labour exchange: a farmer feeds his neighbours and hands round tafia while they clear, plant or harvest for him, and obliges himself to work for them in turn. In the north, Simpson notes, no drums accompany the task — only the samba's lead voice and a conch blown now and then to drive the crew on.

The songs carry love, work, injustice, adventure and scandal, and many are satirical or bawdy. Simpson treats the obscene ones less as evidence of repression, sexual opportunity being plentiful, than as a way of making heavy labour bearable, and reads others as a licensed outlet for envy and resentment, comparing them with material collected in West Africa.