Have you ever thought about folk songs in fantasy worlds?
Preindustrial types sing a LOT. Shanties and hollers pace your work but without the coherent storytelling of ballads or protest songs, they get convoluted. F’rex “Black Betty” popularized by Ram Jam might be about a police wagon, a whip, a musket, a prostitute, all the above. Or “Haul Away Joe” probably existed for decades before adding a lyric about the French Revolution.
Imagine work songs used for centuries of events and trends in worlds full of radically different cultures who regularly interact, and most people are singing incoherent mush. Like say there’s a harvest song about “spin the dragon ‘round” and it’s maybe about a specific dragon slaying incident or at some point people called scythes “dragons” based on the shape or its a dwarf drinking game that halflings adapted as an end of season thing and forgot about, and now there’s also verse in giant.
@Leucrotta There's a part of me that's definitely sad about the degree to which pop music has supplanted folk music in our culture.
Like maybe there’s the clue to some big fantasy world mystery in something your PC just thinks of as “what we sing when we’re working the bellows.”