Labour migration (emigrant) songs are a genre of Ukrainian folk creativity that became widespread in the second half of the 19th century, when, after the abolition of serfdom, landlessness and poverty drove peasants to seasonal work in the southern steppes and the Donbas, and from the late 19th and early 20th centuries thousands of Ukrainians, especially from the western lands, set out to work overseas — to America, Canada, and Brazil.
In these songs sound the longing for the abandoned homeland, the bitterness of farewell, the hard labour and loneliness in a foreign land, and, at the same time, the hope for a better fate. They became a living chronicle of one of the most dramatic pages of Ukrainian history — mass labour emigration. In mood and melody the labour-migration songs are akin to the lyric and recruit songs, and their poignant images of the foreign land and of longing for home preserved for posterity the truth about the fate of the migrants.
