2.

Origins of Jazz: Blues, Spirituals, and Minstrelsey

Elements of African Music

It is my opinion that, while the development of jazz and much of what we consider American music has European and other elements, the striking infusion of African musical elements by slaves is the most important distinction of the American musical landscape. Without that, there would be no blues, no jazz, no rock and roll, no R&B, and no Hip Hop. What we call Latin and Brazillian would not exist as we know it. Perhaps even what we call Country music would be drastically different in an alternate universe where African slaves were never brought to the States.

Examples of traditional African music

African Music Example 1 African Music Example 2 African Music Example 3 African Music Example 4 African Music Example 5 African Music Example 6 African Music Example 7 African Music Example 8

Salient Characteristics of African Music

Ostinato Poly Rhythms Body Percussion/Dance Lyrics used to tell stories Unique form of Polyphony Repetition Call And Response

 Relationship to dance The treatment of "music" and "dance" as separate art forms is a European idea. In many African languages there is no concept corresponding exactly to these terms. For example, in many Bantu languages, there is one concept that might be translated as 'song' and another that covers both the semantic fields of the European concepts of "music" and "dance." So there is one word for both music and dance (the exact meaning of the concepts may differ from culture to culture). For example, in Kiswahili, the word "ngoma" may be translated as "drum," "dance," "dance event," "dance celebration," or "music," depending on the context. Each of these translations is incomplete. The classification of the phenomena of this area of culture into "music" and "dance" is foreign to many African cultures. Therefore, African music and African dance must be viewed in very close connection.

 Akwaaba Excerpt

Historical Context: Slavery in America

Historical Context: Slavery In America

Slavery in the United States was a form of slave labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued mostly in the South until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 following the American Civil War.[1] The first English colony in North America, Virginia, acquired its first Africans in 1619, after a ship arrived, unsolicited, carrying a cargo of about 20 Africans. Thus, a practice established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s was expanded into English North America.

 Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well. Europeans also held some Native Americans as slaves, and African-Native Americans. Slavery spread to the areas where there was good-quality soil for large plantations of high-value cash crops, such as tobacco, cotton, sugar, and coffee. The slaves did the manual labor involved in raising and harvesting these crops.

 By the early decades of the 19th century, the majority of slaveholders and slaves were in the southern United States, where most slaves were engaged in a work-gang system of agriculture on large plantations, especially devoted to cotton and sugar cane. Such large groups of slaves were thought to work more efficiently if directed by a managerial class called overseers, usually white men.

 From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 12 million Africans were shipped as slaves to the Americas. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. By the 1860 United States Census, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million.[

The Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World, as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the slaves were then sold or traded for raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the voyage. Voyages on the Middle Passage were a large financial undertaking, and they were generally organized by companies or groups of investors rather than individuals.

 An estimated 15% of the Africans died at sea, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships. The total number of African deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is estimated at up to two million; a broader look at African deaths directly attributable to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900 suggests up to four million African deaths.

Slave Treatment and Resistance

While treatment of slaves on the passage was varied, slaves' treatment was often horrific because the captured African men and women were considered less than human; they were "cargo," or "goods" and treated as such; they were transported for marketing. For example, the Zong, a British slaver, took too many slaves on its voyage to the New World. Overcrowding combined with malnutrition and disease killed several crew members and around 60 slaves. Bad weather made the Zong's voyage slow; the captain decided to drown his slaves at sea, so the owners could collect insurance on the slaves. Over 100 slaves were killed and a number of slaves chose to kill themselves. The Zong incident became fuel for the abolitionist movement and a major court case, as the insurance company refused to compensate for the loss.

 Excerpt from "Slavery and The Making of America"

Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre[1] that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.

 The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound.

 The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called bluesrock evolved.

African roots of the blues

African American work songs were an important precursor to the modern blues; these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores and roustabouts, and the field hollers and "shouts" of slaves.]

 There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of each individual performance.[5] Some characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-andresponse style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure". This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content".

Alan Lomax recordings

Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 July 19, 2002) was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of Cantometrics, the sampling and statistical analysis of folk music, with the help of collaborators Victor Grauer and Roswell Rudd.

Work Songs
Work Song 1 Work Song 2 Work Song 3 Work Song 4

 The Delta blues is one of the earliest styles of blues music. It originated in the Mississippi Delta, a region of the United States that stretches from Memphis, Tennessee in the north to Vicksburg, Mississippi in the south, Helena, Arkansas in the west to the Yazoo River on the east. The Mississippi Delta area is famous both for its fertile soil and its poverty. Guitar, harmonica and cigar box guitar are the dominant instruments used, with slide guitar (usually on the steel guitar) being a hallmark of the style. The vocal styles range from introspective and soulful to passionate and fiery. Delta blues is also regarded as a regional variation of country blues.

Important Early Blues Artists

Son House(1902-1988) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jN5vqEyV7g Robert Johnson(1911-1938) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLmlz34BUlk &feature=related Leadbelly(Huddie Ledbetter)(1888-1949) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5tOpyipNJs

 Charley Patton(1837-1934) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waz8QqCyhL s&feature=fvst Blind Lemon Jefferson(1893-1929) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ydc91ww8 Big Bill Broonzy(1893-1958) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0c1c0ZsTLA

Excerpt from Ken Burns 1

Ken Burns Jazz 01 Episode 1 23:30-31:26

Spirituals
Spirituals (or Negro spirituals) are religious (generally Christian) songs which were created by enslaved African people in America.

 Although numerous rhythmical and sonic elements of Negro spirituals can be traced to African sources, Negro spirituals are a musical form that is indigenous and specific to the religious experience in the United States of Africans and their descendants. They are a result of the interaction of music and religion from Africa with music and religion of European origin. Further, this interaction occurred only in the United States. Africans who converted to Christianity in other parts of the world, even in the Caribbean and Latin America, did not evolve this form.

 Slaves were de-africanized Secret religious Services-Ring Shouts The Ringshout and The Birth of African American Religion

Famous Negro Spirituals

Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiJx1Hbn_KM Wade In The Water http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg_8L96E3eU&feature= related Michael Row The Boat Ashore http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gce7DDH-F0 Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPZuWzZvoYQ Go Down Moses http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz0sQDhx1rE

Interesting
There is also a duality in the lyrics of spirituals. They communicated many Christian ideals while also communicating the hardship that was a result of being an African-American slave. The spiritual was often directly tied to the composer's life. It was a way of sharing religious, emotional, and physical experience through song.

Amazing Grace
Amazing Wintley Phipps.....

Minstrel Songs
Ken Burns Jazz 01 Episode 1 15:22-21:14

 The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface.

 Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious,[happy-go-lucky, and musical. The minstrel show began with brief burlesques and comic entr'actes in the early 1830s and emerged as a full-fledged form in the next decade. In 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the national art of the time, translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for a general audience.[3]

 By the turn of the 20th century, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by vaudeville. It survived as professional entertainment until about 1910; amateur performances continued until the 1960s in high schools, and local theaters. As blacks began to score legal and social victories against racism and to successfully assert political power, minstrelsy lost popularity.

 Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of what some whites considered significant aspects of blackAmerican culture to be.

Excerpt from Spike Lee s Bamboozled

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C45g3YP7 JOk

 How much influence black music had on minstrel performance remains a debated topic. Minstrel music certainly contained some element of black culture, added onto a base of European tradition with distinct Irish and Scottish folk music influences. Musicologist Dale Cockrell argues that early minstrel music mixed both African and European traditions and that distinguishing black and white urban music during the 1830s is impossible.Insofar as the minstrels had authentic contact with black culture, it was via neighborhoods, taverns, theaters, and waterfronts where blacks and whites could mingle freely. The inauthenticity of the music and the Irish and Scottish elements in it are explained by the fact that slaves were rarely allowed to play native African music and therefore had to adopt and adapt elements of European folk music. Compounding the problem is the difficulty in ascertaining how much minstrel music was written by black composers, as the custom at the time was to sell all rights to a song to publishers or other performers. Nevertheless, many troupes claimed to have carried out more serious "fieldwork".

Minstrel Show Songs

Camptown Races(Steven Foster) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tuu5YtkPIo&featu re=related My Old Kentucky Home http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn_ZbX60Oa4&fea ture=related Oh Susanna http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rijQX5S1AYM Turkey In The Straw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXaTg3ji2W4&feat ure=related