African-American music is a broad term covering a diverse range of musical genres largely developed by African Americans and their culture. Its origins lie in musical forms that developed as a result of the enslavement of African Americans prior to the American Civil War. It has been said that "every genre that is born from America has black roots."
White slave owners subjugated their slaves physically, mentally, and spiritually through brutal and demeaning acts with whipping and death. Some White Americans considered African Americans separate and unequal for centuries, going to extraordinary lengths to keep them oppressed. African-American slaves created a distinctive type of music that played an important role in the era of enslavement. Slave songs, commonly known as work songs, were used to combat the hardships of the physical labor. Work songs were also used to communicate with other slaves without the slave owner hearing. The song "Wade in the Water" was sung by slaves to warn others trying to leave to use the water to obscure their trail. Following the Civil War, African Americans employed playing European music in military bands developed a new style called ragtime that gradually evolved into jazz. Jazz incorporated the sophisticated polyrhythmic structure of dance and folk music of peoples from western and Sub-Saharan Africa. These musical forms had a wide-ranging influence on the development of music within the United States and around the world during the 20th century.
Analyzing African music through the lens of European musicology can leave out much of the cultural use of sound and methods of music making. Some methods of African music making are translated more clearly though the music itself, and not in written form.
Blues and ragtime were developed during the late 19th century through the fusion of West African vocalizations, which employed the natural harmonic series and blue notes. "If one considers the five criteria given by Waterman as cluster characteristics for West African music, one finds that three have been well documented as being characteristic of Afro-American music. Call-and-response organizational procedures, dominance of a percussive approach to music, and off-beat phrasing of melodic accents have been cited as typical of the genre in virtually every study of any kind of African-American music from work songs, field or street calls, shouts, and spirituals to blues and jazz."
The roots of American popular music are deeply intertwined with African-American contributions and innovation. The earliest jazz and blues recordings emerged in the 1910s, marking the beginning of a transformative era in music. These genres were heavily influenced by African musical traditions, and they served as the foundation for many musical developments in the years to come.
As African-American musicians continued to shape the musical landscape, the 1940s witnessed the emergence of rhythm and blues (R&B). R&B became a pivotal genre, blending elements of jazz, blues, and gospel, and it laid the groundwork for the evolution of rock and roll in the following decade.
In the following years, this musical tradition expanded during the Civil Rights Movement. New technology for recording and broadcasting helped the spread of the music, inspiring popular songs and smaller styles around the world. African American music is not only for entertainment, but connects to the community, identity, and cultures.
Historic traits
Most slaves arrived in the Americas from the western coast of Africa. This area encompasses modern-day Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Gambia and parts of Sierra Leone. Harmonic and rhythmic features from these areas, European musical instrumentation, and the chattel slavery forced upon Black Americans all contributed to their music.
Many of the characteristic musical forms that define African-American music have historical precedents. These earlier forms include: field hollers, beat boxing, work song, spoken word, rapping, scatting, call and response, vocality (or special vocal effect: guttural effects, interpolated vocality, falsetto, melisma, vocal rhythmization), improvisation, blue notes, polyrhythms (syncopation, concrescence, tension, improvisation, percussion, swung note), texture (antiphony, homophony, polyphony, heterophony) and harmony (vernacular progressions; complex, multi-part harmony, as in spirituals, doo-wop, and barbershop music).
American composer Olly Wilson outlines "heterogeneous sound ideals" that define traditional and common patterns in African music, such as the use of timbre, pitch, volume and duration, and the incorporation of the body in making music. His findings include uses of call-and-response and the importance of interjections from the audience to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction. These heterogeneous sound ideals are also found in many other types of music.
White people sometimes taught black slaves to play Western instruments such as the fiddle and violin.
Since white colonizers viewed indigenous African religious practices that included drumming and dancing as idolatrous, the enslaved individuals conducted their music-infused religious ceremonies in private. During the eighteenth century, the slaves' informal assemblies in praise houses and brush arbor meetings featured songs and chants such as the ring shout, a circular dance accompanied by chanting and handclapping. On occasion, the participants would enter into ecstatic trances.
Paul Oliver, a Blues historian and historian of African American music and Samuel Charters, an American music historian, have suggested that the essential elements of the blues originated in the Sahel region of West Africa, brought over by Africans via the slave trade. Whereas the African slaves who were brought to South America and the Caribbean were largely from percussion based cultures in southern coastal west Africa (like southern Nigeria), central Africa and Bantu speaking parts of Africa, and lacked in many elements that created the blues, many of the slaves brought to North America were from the Sahel region and were much more familiar with stringed instruments basing the banjo on string instruments from the Sahel like akonting. Charters found that many Sahelian slaves were from Muslim cultures and favoured stringed, melodic, and melismatic solo singing, which differed from the drum-based group chanting music of other African regions. These traditions, which were sometimes permitted by plantation owners who feared drums as a tool of rebellion, thus evolved into the blues.
The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music. Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large Sahel region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilisation between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the Sahel Where The Sahel influenced Maghrebi music like Gnawa. In contrast, very little Maghrebi & Arabic musical influence are in Sahelian music except In Sudanese popular music today where there is middle eastern instrumentation in influence but Sudanese Music remains Sahelian in its elements of music closely related to Ancient Nubian music, historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence on blues music.
Blue note a hallmark of blues music and Rhythm and blues characterised by flattened thirds, fifths, or sevenths—has deep roots in the musical traditions of The Sahel region of West Africa, making African American popular music like the blues having a Sahelian-based origin in contrast to the more percussion based Afro-Brazilian music and Afro-Cuban music which have more of a southern coastal west African, Central African and Bantu influence where the blue note is absent and non-Muslim slaves who generally favored drums and group chants, in the American south these Sahelian African elements combined with European 12-tone musical instruments and harmony. The result has been a uniquely American music which is still widely practised in its original form and is at the foundation of another genre, American jazz.
The Griot tradition of the Sahel also may have influenced Talking blues and by extension Hip-hop, The Griot tradition is also absent in most Bantu speaking central, Eastern and Southern African cultures, Again pointing to a Sahel core origin of African American music
African-American music is also influenced by European music and Native American music.
History 18th century
In the late 18th century folk spirituals originated among Southern slaves following their conversion to Christianity. Slaves reinterpreted the practice of Christianity in a way that had meaning to them as Africans in America. They often sang the spirituals in groups as they worked the plantation fields. African-American spirituals (Negro Spirituals) were created in invisible churches and regular Black churches. The hymns, melody, and rhythms were similar to songs heard in West Africa. Enslaved and free blacks created their own words and tunes. Themes include the hardships of slavery and the hope of freedom.
Spirituals from the era of slavery are called Slave Shout Songs. These shout songs are sung today by Gullah Geechee people and other African Americans in churches and praise houses. During slavery, these songs were coded messages that spoke of escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad and were sung by enslaved African Americans in plantation fields to send coded messages to other slaves, unbeknownst to the slaveholders. According to musicologist and historian Eric Sean Crawford who published Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands, Gullah music influenced all genres of American music. Crawford said: "All genres of music have been influenced by Gullah Geechee spirituals. This music's bent notes, syncopated rhythms, and improvisational qualities heavily influenced gospel and country music. These musical traits found a secular home in the blues, jazz, and even later popular styles like hip hop". Scholar LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant explained Gullah spirituals are sacred music that connects Black Americans to ancestral spirits. She said: "I am suggesting that low country sacred music simultaneously takes on a cyclical and linear quality, which is best exemplified in the use of the low country clap, and the repetition of verses that literally push a song forward to invoke The Spirit. The rhythmic practices and theological motifs of this music suspend and push time by connecting with past traditions, while denoting a spiritual bond that is simultaneously ancestral, communal, and divine".