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Overview
One of the first and best surveys in its field, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. has long been admired for its perceptive history and analysis of the origins and musical qualities of typical forms, ranging from simple cries and calls to anthems and spirituals, ballads, and the blues. Traditional dances and musical instruments are examined as well. The author — a well-known novelist, folklorist, journalist, and specialist in African and African American cultures — offers a discerning study of the influence of this genre on popular music, with particular focus on how jazz developed out of folk traditions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486836492 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 09/18/2019 |
| Series: | Dover Books On Music: Folk Songs |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Setting
IT IS A LITTLE LATE in the day to apologize for reference to African traditions in discussing Negro folk music in the United States. Whether a large number of Negro spirituals developed out of white spirituals or not is of minor importance when one considers American Negro folk music in its entirety. The field is vast, and it is difficult to explore it or understand it properly without recognizing the African heritage. This is not to say that United States Negro music is African, but that many characteristics of African musical styles persist to this day. Some of those characteristics are melodic or rhythmic concepts. Some are to be found in the relationships between voices, and between voices and instruments. Others are in the instruments themselves, and in the use of those instruments. Still others are found in concepts of vocal and instrumental sound, in accidental conflicts with traditional Western scales, in motor actions associated with singing and dancing, and in attitudes toward music and music making.
That Negro folk music in the United States is preeminently "American" is all too evident. It could have come into being only in the United States, where elements of specific cultures were brought together under conditions that were not exactly duplicated anywhere else. European and African elements mingled to produce one result in the Spanish islands of the Caribbean, another in the English islands, a third in the French islands. The result was still different in Brazil and Venezuela . In all of those places, the process of cross-fertilization of musical styles continues, but elements of European and West African tradition survive, sometimes in pure form. In the days when analysis of Negro music in the United States depended on comparison with notated European and West African tunes, it was perhaps easy to accept the notion that European traits-primarily English, Irish, and Scottish had almost obliterated the last vestige of African musical tradition. We are aware now that the evidence for a considered conclusion was inadequate. Among other things, African samplings were relatively sparse, and our conventional system of notation was not adjustable enough to properly set down various characteristics of African music. And finally, it is doubtful that the American Negro examples then analyzed represented a true cross section of the repertoire, spirituals being the choice exhibits.
Since the days of earliest interest in this subject, our knowledge of both the American and the African scenes has increased tremendously. We now have a vast reservoir of recorded folk or traditional music from Africa, the Caribbean, and Negro communities of the American mainland. Much work has been done in the field by ethnomusicologists, and anthropological observations have added a new frame of reference. We know that there is a wide range of styles in West African music, with differences within specific cultures as well as between regions. Some traits of Negro music in the United States that were once believed to be exclusively European have been found to exist also in Africa. Furthermore, certain heretofore unnoticed traits of United States Negro music have come to be recognized, and can now be related to specific African ways of doing things.
When it is appreciated that other elements of West African life and thinking have survived in the United States until recent times-and, indeed, even to the present moment-the surprise at finding a modest number of African musical traits is less, and it is easier to understand why American Negro folk music is different from American white folk music. Some of the resistance shown toward the fact of African survival has had a social rather than an intellectual character. There have been members of the Negro community who felt that the existence of African survivals was a disparagement of their group, that mention of such matters only served to belittle the cultural accomplishments of the Negro American. Conversely, there were whites who held tenaciously to the view that when the African came to the New World he was without significant values and traditions, and that everything the Negro knew was gleaned from the white society around him. But various elements of African-derived custom, including attitudes and values, which are visible today in the United States, even in subtle or disguised forms, contradict both of these positions.
The Negro slaves of the New World came from many regions of West and West-Central Africa, and were recruited from some cultures whose accomplishments have only recently come to be fully appreciated. The Yoruba, the Fon people of Dahomey, the Ashanti, and various other tribes of West Africa had highly developed religious systems, complex systems of law and equity, pride of history and tradition, a high order of arts and crafts, music and dance, a vast oral literature ranging from proverbs to epics, moral and ethical codes in large part comparable to those of Asia and Europe, and complex systems of social organization. It is only in recent years that the true significance of West African achievements has come to be fully appreciated. African sculptural art emerged only in this century into the full light of day as a powerful tradition; it deeply affected Western painters and sculptors, and art collectors and dealers have set a high price on their African wood carvings, ivory carvings, and brass castings. More recently, the true nature of African musical accomplishment is being comprehended as a far cry from "monotonous chanting" and tom-tom playing described by early visitors to the Dark Continent.
It is difficult to imagine that huge numbers of African exiles, gathered together in a new setting, would forget everything they knew and become a vacuum into which the attributes of another culture could be poured at will. In the ordinary course of adjustment, the African and his descendants absorbed and learned from the dominant culture in which they found themselves. Those attributes of the master culture which were essential to their survival, or which were congenial to their past learning, were taken over most quickly, while they clung to those aspects of African life for which they found no satisfactory substitutes. The tenacity man has shown for clinging to old values is a constant source of wonder. Witness the presence of the Christmas tree, inherited, we are to understand, from pre-Christian rites, standing as a symbol in the midst of rituals dramatizing the birth of Christ. When we recall that African slaves were imported into the United States legally until early in the nineteenth century, and as contraband virtually until the Civil War, we realize that African motifs have been injected into this setting within the lifetime of some persons still living.
The nature of some of these motifs has been made clear by anthropological studies of the past two or three decades. Additional validity has been given to such studies by work done in other Negro communities in the Americas, providing a new base for comparison. Acculturation in the islands of the West Indies, in Brazil, Venezuela, and Surinam, for example, had one common element-African cultural inheritance. Certain muted, disguised, or filtered African survivals in the United States become more apparent when they are discovered to exist also in Jamaica, Haiti, or Trinidad in less disguised form. Our enlightenment on this score becomes more swift as we recognize the clues given so amply in these neighboring Negro communities.
In his book, The Myth of the Negro Past, Melville Herskovits some years ago provided us with some valuable insights into New World African survivals. Some of those survivals are isolated phenomena; others are aspects of clustered phenomena which are held together by a central concept, for example, religious belief. Many are so commonplace as to go virtually unnoticed. The carrying of bundles on the head, the manner in which a young child is sometimes held so that it straddles the mother's hip, the woman's head wrapped in a kerchief or headcloth — all characteristic of the old South, and frequently seen today — are African patterns. Hairdressing styles for girls — the plaiting into small designs and the binding or wrapping of tiny pigtails — so common until recently in the South, are characteristic of Africa and the West Indies. In Haiti, with its essentially African background, these hair designs are called "gardens." In the Georgia Sea Islands, rice was, and still is, winnowed in baskets or trays in the African manner, and at various places in the southern states, grain is pulverized in hand-hewn wooden mortars of the African type. The way in which the mortar is used in the Sea Islands, with two or three women working together with long pestles, is clearly an African concept, as is demonstrated in photographic documentation in a book by Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea lslands.
A complex code of what we might be inclined to dispose of as "polite behavior" is noted by Herskovits as having special significance in relation to African tradition. The conventionalized respect for elders, the aversion to "sassing" an old person, the turning of the head to demonstrate respect, the covering of the mouth when laughing, all are explained as manifestations of African attitudes. So are the interjections of "Ah-hah," "Do, Jesus," and other similar exclamations by a congregation in the course of a sermon, and of "Aint it so," "It's the truth," and "Yeah, man" by someone listening to a secular statement or narration. These exclamations are a reinforcement of, or applause for, the words of the speaker and are comparable to similar usage elsewhere in the Negro communities of the New World as well as in Africa.
The importance of fraternal orders, burial societies, and secret societies has been cited by Herskovits and others as having special meaning to Negro communities in the United States. With the breakdown of more ancient forms of social organization in the American setting, these organizations have been able to play a special role in assuring proper burial of deceased persons-a paramount consideration in West African life.
Recent studies of the Gullah dialect of the Georgia Sea Islands have suggested that a significant part of the vocabulary has an African origin, rather than being, as stated by some earlier observers, a mispronouncing or corruption of English, or merely the survival of an early English dialect.
One spokesman for the earlier view, Guy B. Johnson, wrote that "the charm of the folk stories of the Sea Island people is inseparably bound up with the staccato tones of their speech and the quaintness of their idiom. ... The first impression of the newcomer upon hearing the oldtimers talk is apt to be that he is listening to a foreign language. There are older Negroes in the Sea Islands who speak in such a way that a stranger would have to stay around them several weeks before he could understand them and converse with them to his satisfaction. ... But this strange dialect turns out to be little more than the peasant English of two centuries ago, modified to meet the needs of the slaves. ... From this pleasant speech and from the 'baby talk' used by the masters in addressing them, the Negroes developed that dialect, sometimes known as Gullah, which remains the characteristic feature of the culture of the Negroes of coastal Sou th Carolina and Georgia."
However, a study of the Gullah dialect by Lorenzo Turner found in the vocabulary of this region approximately four thousand words which appeared to be of West African derivation, in addition to many survivals in syntax, inflections, and intonations. In Georgia, he recorded some songs with African word texts and others with mixed African and English words. He found that many African phrases had been rendered in English, while there were "whole African phrases ... without change either of meaning or pronunciation." For comparison with his own findings, Turner referred to some earlier evaluations which dismissed African vocabulary survivals as negligible. He found that a considerable number of words that had been written down as though they were English or bizarre corruptions of English appeared to be Vai, Mende, and Wolof.
Not only workaday words but also many personal names have been demonstrated to have West African origin. Such names as Coffee (Ashanti: Kofi), Bilah, and Kwako (all heard at one time or another by this observer), and a number of others of West African provenience may be encountered almost anywhere between the East Coast and the Mississippi. In addition, many personal names in English, such as Tuesday, Thursday, Foreday, and Earthy, carry on a West African practice of calling children after special days or phenomena associated with circumstances of birth or other traditional considerations. Turner found that all twelve months of the year and all seven days of the week are used as names, in addition to Wind, Hail, Storm, Freeze, Morning, Cotton, Peanut, Hardtime, Easter, and Harvest.
African vocabulary and grammar patterns have survived elsewhere in the Americas, as indicated in various studies of New World pidgin English (in Surinam) and Creole (the West Indies). Even tonal aspects of African speech may prove to have left their mark on Negro speech in the New World. The traditional "musical" quality of the Negro dialect, so-called, may well be related to African use of tone for semantic purposes.
American Negro folk tales, which make up a large part of the oral literature, include animal stories, human tales, tales of magic, moralizing stories, and some tales that verge on the heroic or epic. A great portion of them stem from European oral tradition, some are from the Bible, and many derive from daily life in slavery and postslavery days; but in the view of this writer and a number of other investigators, an overwhelming number of the stories have prototypes in West and Central Africa. The African affinity is seen most readily in the animal tales first popularized in the white segment of the population by Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus series, but it is also apparent in stories of other kinds. Some tales have been found in which a king or another notable person replaces West African sky deities or culture heroes. Anansi, the Ashanti trickster hero (originally a spider), as well as his son Intikuma, is called by name in a large cycle of tales told in the United States and other New World Negro settings.
Religious life, also, is marked by retention of persistent concepts and attitudes that were originally developed in the West African cultures. Among the more conspicuous retentions are the Negroes' regard for baptismal or water rites, their view of the ecstatic seizure as an orthodox expression of faith, and the unusual importance of music and — except where it has gone out of style through the desire to conform to white practices — rhythm. All of these elements are essentially a part of West African religious ritual , and are found to have persisted strongly in either pure or disguised form in a large part of Negro America, notably Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Guianas, Carriacou, Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil. The ecstatic seizure — getting of the "spirit" — fundamental in African religious experience, is a commonplace characteristic of religious worship, "pagan" or Christian, throughout Negro areas of the Western Hemisphere. Water rites, sometimes called "baptising," pervade almost every aspect of Haitian religious practice. The significance of this aspect of worship has been set forth in a number of anthropological studies.
If one goes back just beyond the turn of the century, he finds that Negroes in the Louisiana area were familiar with the names of a number of West African deities, such as Limba, Agoussou, Dani (Dan), Liba (Legba or Limba), and others, all of whom had become syncretized (as in Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad) with Christian saints. Numerous rites concerned with burials, wakes, and other occasions for memorializing the dead have been shown to retain certain characteristics of African practice which are generally not present in Euro-American tradition. Not more than fifty or sixty years ago drumming and African-style dancing in church, at wakes, and at funerals were known at least in the Georgia Sea Islands, and probably elsewhere on the mainland. Remnants of the religious dance are found today in the shout, in which shuffling and handclapping are an echo of the common scenes of a few generations ago.
Having recognized the presence of specific African traits in Negro life in the New World generally, and in the United States in particular, we are in a somewhat better position to examine and evaluate non-European, seemingly African characteristics of American Negro folk music. That there was African influence is not to be doubted, and if the music reflects that influence it is difficult to reject the evidence out of hand.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Negro Folk Music U.S.A."
by .
Copyright © 1991 Harold Courlander.
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