Jazz History: From African Rituals to Ragtime and Blues

The Africanization of American Music and the Rituals of Congo Square

• Detailed Scene of Congo Square:

  • In nineteenth-century New Orleans, an open area known as Congo Square (today Louis Armstrong Park) was a site for slave dances that preserved African traditions.
  • Instruments and Technique:
    • The music featured large cylindrical drums, roughly a foot in diameter, played with rapid, sharp strokes using fingers and the edge of the hand.
    • Other instruments included stringed instruments made from calabashes and drums fashioned from hollowed gourds.
    • Benjamin Latrobe, a noted architect, witnessed these dances on February 21, 1819, leaving written accounts and sketches that confirm the instruments were virtually identical to those used in indigenous African music.
  • Atmosphere and Scale:
    • Crowds of five or six hundred individuals moved in circular groups.
    • Observers noted women chanting and circles of dancers performing stomping and swaying movements.

• The Significance of Congo Square as Cultural Resistance:

  • Music historian Ned Sublette noted that playing a hand drum in 1819 was a "tremendous act of will, memory and resistance," as African manifestations were being systematically erased elsewhere in the United States.
  • The gatherings dissolved Western divisions between performer and audience, song and dance, and secular and spiritual impulses (one 1808 account explicitly used the word "worship").

• The Ring Shout Tradition:

  • Definition: A ritual of rotating, counterclockwise movement in circular patterns, typically less than $10$ feet in diameter.
  • Scholar Sterling Stuckey identified it as the primary context for Africans to recognize shared values.
  • Longevity and Evolution:
    • The tradition persisted into the mid-twentieth century; John and Alan Lomax recorded it in Louisiana in 1934, and Marshall Stearns observed it in South Carolina as late as the 1950s.
    • Public Congo Square dances ceased around $1885$ (some research suggests an earlier cutoff of $1870$).
    • Samuel Floyd argued that the ring "straightened itself" to become the Second Line of jazz funerals, maintaining identical counterclockwise movements.

Syncretism and the Roots of New Orleans Culture

• Cultural Syncretism:

  • Definition: The blending together of cultural elements that previously existed separately.
  • This synergy between the Americanization of African music and the Africanization of American music is the foundation of jazz.
  • Renowned reed player Sidney Bechet recalled in his autobiography Treat It Gentle how his grandfather beat out rhythms in Congo Square, emphasizing that music was an innate part of his identity.

• Historical Precedents of African-European Blending:

  • The mixture began at least one thousand years before the founding of New Orleans in 1718.
  • The Moorish Impact: The North African conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century heavily influenced Spanish architecture, painting, and music.
  • Historian Edward Gibbon suggested in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that if Charles Martel had not defeated Moorish forces at the Battle of Tours in $732\,AD$, the Koran might be taught at Oxford.

• The "Spanish Tinge" and Latin Affinities:

  • Jelly Roll Morton famously asserted that jazz requires a "Spanish tinge" for proper "seasoning."
  • New Orleans was only $1/8$ Anglo-American following the Louisiana Purchase.
  • Examples of Early Latin Influence:
    • A Mexican cavalry band performed daily at the 1884–85 World’s Cotton Centennial Exposition.
    • Basile Barès (1845–1902) used a Cuban habanera rhythm in "Los Campanillas."
    • Louis Moreau Gottschalk achieved success with "Bamboula."
    • Hart’s music store on Canal Street published over $80$ Mexican compositions in the late nineteenth century.

• Laissez-Faire Environment:

  • Latin-Catholic culture was more tolerant of social hybrids than the English-Protestant ethos.
  • Under Spanish law, slaves had the right of coartación, allowing them to purchase their freedom based on an adjudicated contract.
  • Refugees from the Haitian Revolution (approx. $6,000$ in 1808) and immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Scotland further mixed with local African populations (many from Senegambia).

The Evolution of the African American Work Song

• Resilience through Oppression:

  • After the first documented arrival of Africans in Jamestown in 1619, music and folktales became the most resilient cultural carryovers.
  • Suppression: Drums were banned in South Carolina following the Stono Rebellion of 1739; Georgia codes banned horns and loud instruments.

• Lining Hymns and Cross-Fertilization:

  • Efforts to convert slaves using Dr. Isaac Watts' Hymns and Spiritual Songs resulted in the "Africanization" of psalms.
  • Alan Lomax described "lining hymns" as a mysterious polyphony where singers improvised variations simultaneously, creating " unified streams of tone."

• Work Songs as Economic Preservation:

  • Overseers encouraged music because it boosted productivity.
  • Variants: Field hollers, levee camp hollers, prison work songs, and street cries.
  • These songs reflect an African approach that integrates music into functionality and disciplined labor, as noted by historian Eugene D. Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll.

Core Characteristics of African Music Heritage

• Functional and Social Integration:

  1. Call-and-Response: Transcends the artist-audience divide; used for social integration.
  2. Functionality: Music is tied to rituals and social needs, retaining an "otherworldly" quality rather than being mundane background noise.
  3. Cross-fertilization with Dance: Understanding music implies knowing the dance it accompanies (John Miller Chernoff).
  4. Vocality in Instrumentation: Using instruments like the kalangu (talking drum) to emulate the human voice.
  5. Improvisation and Spontaneity.

• Rhythmic Richness and Instrumentation:

  • Henry Edward Krehbiel (1893 World's Columbian Exposition) described the rhythmic sense of African drummers as superior to modern composers, noting a combination of double and triple time.
  • Body as Instrument: John Storm Roberts noted that the human voice and hands (clapping) are the most used instruments in Africa.
  • Discarded Objects: Former slave Wash Wilson recalled making drums from sheep’s rib, cow’s jaw, iron, old kettles, and hollowed tree trunks ($1$ to $4$ feet high).

The Development of the Blues

• Psychological and Structural Foundations:

  • The blues offered individual catharsis for personal pain and oppression, similar to Aristotle's concept of tragedy.
  • Blues Form: A repeating $12$-bar pattern based on the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords. The repeating lyric stanza follows an AAB pattern.
  • Blue Notes: The use of the major and minor third, the flattened seventh, and later the flattened fifth. Performers used "bent" notes to slide between pitches.

• Country Blues vs. Classic Blues:

  • Country Blues: Solo male singer with guitar accompaniment (e.g., Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House).
    • Robert Johnson: The most legendary figure, codified the Delta tradition into a coherent vision. Notable songs: "Hellhound on My Trail," "Cross Road Blues." He died at age $27$ on August 13, 1938.
  • Classic Blues: Female vocalists fronting a band; more professional arrangements and commercial focus (e.g., Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith).
    • Race Records: The recording of "Crazy Blues" by Mamie Smith in 1920 sold 75,000 copies in a month, sparking a massive market.

• Key Figures of the Classic Blues:

  • Gertrude "Ma" Rainey: The "Mother of the Blues." Toured with minstrel shows; recorded with Louis Armstrong.
  • Bessie Smith: The "Empress of the Blues." Known for her pitch control, sexual double entendre, and powerful voice that required no amplification. She toured the TOBA (Theatre Owner’s Booking Agency) circuit. On "St. Louis Blues" ($1925$), her tempo remained languid at $60\,bpm$.

Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Craze

• Definition and Form:

  • Ragtime is characterized by "ragged time"—a striding on-the-beat bass in the left hand (beats $1$ and $3$ on octaves/fifths, beats $2$ and $4$ on chords) with syncopated right-hand melodies.
  • Classic Form: AABBACCDD, using $16$-bar themes.

• Social and Industry Context:

  • Pianos became ubiquitous; production grew from $100,000$ in $1890$ to $350,000$ in $1909$.
  • Mechanical player pianos (like the 1897 Angelus) made music accessible to non-players.
  • Missouri (Sedalia and St. Louis) was the center of activity with composers like Scott Joplin, Scott Hayden, Arthur Marshall, Louis Chauvin, and James Scott, and publisher John Stark.

• Scott Joplin ($1868\text{--}1917$):

  • Born in Texarkana; his father was a former slave who played violin, and his mother played banjo.
  • Compositional Philosophy: Joplin insisted, "Do not play this piece fast." He sought to elevate ragtime to serious art.
  • Major Works: "Maple Leaf Rag" (first sheet music to sell $1$ million copies), "Solace" (habanera style), "Magnetic Rag" (melancholy and complex).
  • Operatic Ambitions: He wrote Treemonisha, an African American folk opera. A self-financed $1915$ Harlem performance failed. Joplin died of syphilis on April 1, 1917.
  • Legacy: Posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize after a 1970s revival, Joplin’s work bridged the gap between highbrow composition and popular syncopation.

Questions & Discussion

• Q: How did the Second Line evolve?
  • A: According to Samuel Floyd, it is the "straightened" version of the counterclockwise African ring shout. Participants kept the specific ritual movements but directed them from a cemetery back to town instead of moving in a stationary circle.
• Q: What is the significance of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition for musicians?
  • A: It was a massive fair where African musicians demonstrated polyrhythms that Western experts like Henry Edward Krehbiel and John Comfort Fillmore found impossible to notate using traditional systems.
• Q: How did Spanish law impact slave culture in New Orleans?
  • A: It was less rigid than English laws, allowing for the right of coartación and the ownership of property, which created an atmosphere where public expressions like those in Congo Square could survive.