Afro-American Music

This tape is being made especially for the students who are interested in Afro-American music. This text is being made by Portia Maultsby Ph. D., of Indiana University in America.

The first thing I would like to say is: Afro-American music has its roots in African music. The blacks in America came from Africa and therefore their culture is rooted in that of African traditions. For many years Americans didn't acknowledge the African heritage of the black population, but instead wanted to describe the culture of this group as being an imitation (and a poor one at that) of Euro-American cultures. But today it is widely acknowledged that the traditions and customs and, in general, the culture of Afro-Americans is based on the cultures of Central and West Africa, the two regions from which most of the black people came to America.

Because the culture was very different, it was described in negative terms. European travellers — the missionaries from Europe as well as the slave holders who were from Europe but living in America — often described the music, the traditions and activities of slaves as barbaric, pagan, indecent, and all sorts of other negative terms were used. This culture again being an African culture was aesthetically very different from that of Europe. Because the culture was seen as pagan and barbaric and primitive the Europeans decided that black Americans should learn to be more like them and act like them. They therefore introduced various aspects of their culture into that of the slaves.

One of the first traditions introduced to slaves was that of their western ways of worship, meaning Christianity. They instructed the slaves in the principles of Christianity, which involved teaching them the Christian psalms and hymns.

Blacks, however, or the slaves, did not sing the songs as taught to them by the Euro-Americans, nor did they worship in the way that they were taught by these people. What they did was to reinterpret the religious culture of the Europeans to conform to an African way of religion and an African way of singing.

This African way may be described as the use of call-and-response structures, or what is known as a leader-chorus structure. In using this structure, which we also refer to as a form, an individual improvises one line of text, and the group of singers — or in this case the

congregation — responds with a line of text which is repeated as a response after each improvised line of text.

The whole notion of improvisation is African in its origin. The other characteristic that distinguished African and slave singing from that of their European counterparts was the addition of hand clapping and foot stamping to the music, as musical accompaniment. In Africa, drumming and hand clapping were the major sources of instrumental accompaniment. But in America, whites forbade blacks after period of time to play drums.

The reason for this was that the slave holders realized that these drums were being used to communicate messages for slaves to gather and revolt or run away. So laws were enacted to forbid slaves from playing drums or illegally gathering without the supervision of whites. But there were too many slaves to be controlled by whites, and at night they would slip away in the forest regions and meet and discuss their plans. Or there were too many slaves to be instructed by the few white ministers that were available. And in time slaves began to conduct their own religious services.

So it is in this context and away from whites that American black slaves were able to develop a culture that in its earlier stages was very African, and then later, as slaves interacted more with European cultures, the culture that eventually evolved among blacks was known

as Afro-American.

It is important to keep in mind that the Afro-American culture is not purely African, but yet is derived from African values, aesthetics and a way of thinking. And because it is not purely African we cannot call it an African culture in America. Whereas, the distinction can be: in earlier days, for example in the early 1700s and throughout the 1600s, blacks were celebrating African holidays; they were singing African songs; they were doing purely African dances; they were electing African kings. But by the 1800s they were required to participate in the holidays of their masters, of the Europeans in America, and what they did do was to take these holidays, to take the European culture that they were forced to learn and adopt it from an African frame of reference, so that it made sense to them. Which is what they did with Christianity. It was a way in which they adapted and survived in their new environment.

Another example would be that the slaves did not have access to African instruments. So they were not playing African instruments.

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