African Origins and Acculturation in the New World: Detailed Notes

Chapter 3: African Origins and Acculturation in the New World

Analysis of “Arwhoolie”

Field holler performed by Thomas Marshall in Edwards, Mississippi, 1939.
Recorded by folklorists from the Library of Congress.
Arhythmic and chant-like, with a sad, wailing quality similar to African solo songs.
Often about hard work or unfortunate conditions.
This particular holler is sung late in the evening, looking forward to quitting: “I won’t be here long,” “Dark gonna catch me here.”
Verse-refrain or call-and-response pattern is clear even in this solo performance.
Opens with an ornamented melody on “Oh,” acting as the refrain or response, sung in the upper range for emotional effect.
Lyric line alternates with the refrain, sung in the lower range for expressive contrast.

Analysis of “Hammer, Ring”

Recorded by John and Alan Lomax at the State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, 1934.
A work song, differing from field holler by being sung to a strict rhythmic pulse by a group of workers (prisoners).
Classic example of integrating music with the task it accompanies.
Tempo and melodic/rhythmic embellishments are dictated by the steady pulse of falling hammers.
Strophic, repetitive song alternating between a changing verse by the soloist and a static refrain by the group.
Leader blends two themes: the hammer (“Won’t you ring, old hammer?”) and the Bible story of Noah.
Serves as an anesthetic due to hypnotic repetition, creating a euphoric state that numbs laborers to the backbreaking work.
Intensity increases among singers each time the soloist goes into the upper range, with whoops, shouts, and embellishments.

Chapter 4: Early Commercialization of African-American Music

Elements of African-American Music

Acculturation: Displaced Africans altered European scales, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and sound aesthetics to align with their own musical traditions.
Hybridization resulted in music that was neither European nor African, nor an Afro-Euro blend found elsewhere.
Spirituals, labor songs, game songs, and ballads shaped America’s distinctive musical style, influencing genres from musical theater to rock and roll.
Stylistic elements are present in all styles; include blue notes, unique tone production, motor rhythm, syncopation, swing feeling, and improvisation.

Blue Notes:

Associated with the feeling and sound of the blues, a parent style of jazz.
Developed in the southern United States around the same time as jazz.
Based on the European major scale (seven notes).
Lowering the pitch of the third and seventh notes in this scale would make blue notes.
African-Americans made these pitch adjustments because the tuning of the European major scale sounded foreign to them.
To European ears, these lowered notes sound like a minor scale, associated with sad or dramatic music.
Even used in joyous music, blue notes give African-American music a melancholy expression.

Unique Tone Production:

Greatest contrast between European art music and African-American music.
European art music aims for a pure sound consistently maintained throughout a note.
African-American music accepts and encourages individual character of timbre, like nasal sounds, growls, and hoarseness.
Rough timbre characterizes African-American music as much as blue notes.

Motor Rhythm:

Presentation of a steady rhythmic pulse at a consistent tempo.
Common in music that facilitates coordinated body movement like dancing, marching, rowing, or hammering.
Provides a foundation against which rhythmic devices such as syncopation and swing feeling work.

Syncopation:

Lilting, jagged feeling comes from syncopation.
Accent the weak beats, or displacing the accents, we create a lighter feel that is the basis of syncopation.

Swing Feeling:

Relaxed rhythmic feeling and softer articulation of notes superimposed over the tense rhythmic drive of the steady pulse.
Achieved by softer articulation to begin each note.
Musicians play three subdivisions of the beat instead of two.
Creates a lopsided, bouncy feeling, giving African-American music a relaxed character amid the even, driving motor rhythm.

Improvisation:

Spontaneous creation of a performer reacting to the musical environmental situation.
Range of freedom is wide.
Paraphrasing the melody: altering original rhythms or adding ornamental notes.
Creating new melodies from well-practiced musical phrases (licks) to fit preexisting chords.
Creating freer improvisations not obligated to follow set chord changes, key, or scale.
Faded in European art music tradition but highly prioritized in African-American music.
Places the center of responsibility on the individual musician, who is at once composer and performer.
Each improvised performance is unique and cannot be replicated.
Recordings are the only way improvised performances exist in permanent form.

Elements of African-American Music

African communal and integrated into everyday life.
Music is not always judged on its own merit, but on how it serves the function it accompanies.
Highly rhythmic, repetitive, and conducive to dance.
Groups play simple multilinear rhythmic lines that interlock in complex ways.
Dirtying the sound of the voice or an instrument is considered aesthetically desirable.
Latin-Catholic colonies allowed slaves to retain more African traditions than did the British-Protestant colonies of the mainland South.
Blacks were eventually forced to establish their own churches and sacred music styles, employing latent African characteristics to the worship and the songs.

Early Commercialization of African-American Music

African-American folk music evolved in the kitchens, fields, and prisons of the southern United States.
This evolution took place in the arena of the common people rather than the professional stage.
White minstrel entertainers created facsimiles of black music, dance, and culture to the delight of white audiences all over the country.
Blacks eventually formed minstrel ensembles and, later on, moved into vaudeville.
Theatrical settings and the burgeoning sheet music industry provided an entrée to the commercialization of authentic African-American music.
Ragtime provided the catalyst for this commercial growth.

Ragtime:

White Kentucky songwriter, Ben Harney, used the term ragtime in print to describe his own songs, although in form and rhythm they did not resemble instrumental rags at all.
The immense popularity of these songs, along with the employment of the term ragtime, led popular music away from the vapid sentimental repertoire of nineteenth-century Victorian style and paved the way for the popularity of instrumental ragtime.
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a major tourist event.
Pianists were playing what we now know as ragtime; this is the first time the music was heard by a large mainstream audience.

Player Piano:

A piano roll (a roll of paper perforated with holes) unwinds on a mechanism in the piano, passing over a tracker bar with 88 air holes that align with the perforations on the paper roll.
When the hole of the roll passes over the hole of the tracker bar, air is taken in that triggers a pneumatic lifter to make the corresponding hammer strike a string on the piano.
Before the widespread use of phonographs, the player piano was the only form of recorded music available for the home.

Scott Joplin:

The most famous of all ragtime pianists.
Born near Texarkana, Texas; and, unlike the majority of black itinerant pianists, he had a fair degree of formal training.
His skills as a pianist were quite modest, but his ragtime compositions are the pinnacle of that art form.
Composed “Maple Leaf Rag,” published in 1899 while he was playing at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri.

Analysis of “Maple Leaf Rag”

This recording of “Maple Leaf Rag” features a player piano roll of a performance by Scott Joplin himself.
“Maple Leaf Rag,” like all rags, is a multithematic form; that is, it is a composition made up of a succession of three or four melodic sections.
The rhythmic relationship between the left and right hand is typical of all rags. The left hand alternates an even bass/chord accompaniment to the syncopated melody in the right hand.

Commercialization of the Blues

Commercial recordings of the raw folk form of the blues came after its polished, urban commercialized form.
Twelve-bar blues strains began appearing in published piano rags as early as 1904.
The real popularity of the commercial blues began with the work of W. C. Handy (1873–1958).
Handy was a formally trained black musician from Florence, Alabama.
Handy’s first blues composition was “Memphis Blues,” written as a campaign song for the Memphis mayoral race in 1909.

Analysis of “St. Louis Blues”

Recording is by the greatest of the classic blues singers, Bessie Smith.
Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” is actually a formal blend of ragtime, verse-chorus song, and 12-bar blues.
1923 also saw the first recordings of folk-blues artists (mostly male) recorded on location in the South.
With the commercial distribution of ragtime and blues, the process of oral tradition changed among musicians.

Chapter 5: American Blues Traditions

American Blues Traditions

Songsters: Versatile black folk musicians who played a variety of music, including ballads, chants, spirituals, minstrel songs, ragtime, and simple country songs.
Blacks sang about legendary heroes and villains, about notable events and deeds.
The blues: A new black musical form that borrowed from the spiritual, the field holler and work song, and the three-line ballad.
Harmonic framework derived from simple hymns of the church.

The Blues

Subject matter was predominantly sorrowful, as singers and their audiences came to grips with the bleak conditions of their lives: social injustice, failed love, a nomadic life.

Mississippi Delta Blues

Mississippi Delta blues is arguably the most pervasive of the regional styles.
The earliest known blues musicians, certainly the most influential, came from the Delta.
Narrow the genesis of Delta blues down to Dockery’s Plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi. From there came the “father of the Delta blues,” Charley Patton.

Charley Patton:

Patton’s vocal quality was rough, growling, and intense.
He also tended to let his voice melt into his guitar playing, never finishing the line of lyric—or perhaps letting the guitar finish it.
Historian Robert Palmer says Patton obscured or altered the syllabic accent of words strictly for musical reasons, so that his voice could contribute to the rhythm of the guitar accompaniment.
Patton’s guitar accompaniment was simple, but it created a strong dance rhythm, accented by his slapping the guitar with his hand or snapping the guitar’s strings against its neck.
The bottleneck guitar technique is also characteristic of Delta blues.
Charley Patton taught many blues singers, and many more were influenced by him.

Robert Johnson:

Johnson, like most of the Delta bluesmen, had a vast repertoire other than blues songs, including polkas, country and western songs, sentimental ballads, and Tin Pan Alley pop songs.
He played a full-sounding and rhythmic style of guitar, being adept at slide guitar and picking a solid lead line on the high strings.

Analysis of “Hellhound on My Trail”

Johnson uses potent imagery to describe his wandering, a sense of paranoia, of being pursued by something not quite known or seen, and a longing for true love’s comfort.

Other Blues Regions in the South

Delta blues is the best documented and romanticized of the blues strains
Atlanta blues features a more delicate finger-picking style on the guitar, as opposed to the more forceful rhythmic feel of Delta blues guitarists.
Another major center for the blues was Dallas, Texas.
He was a major influence on the blues styles of Leadbelly, Son House, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, and many others.

Country Blues Leaves the Country:

The first step was migration to the city, and for many southern blacks, the first city was Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis lies on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in the southwest corner of Tennessee, bordering Mississippi and Arkansas.
One of the most popular blues formats in Memphis was the jug band.