African-American Music: Making & Shaping an Indigenous Tradition

Playlist Ice-Breaker (Top-50 R&B, June 2020)

  • Professor Keyes begins class with a rapid montage of contemporary hits to illustrate the living, evolving nature of Black popular music
    • Tracks sampled: The Weeknd – “In Your Eyes,” Lil Dicky ft. Chris Brown – “Freaky Friday,” Bruno Mars – “Finesse,” Jhene Aiko – “PY Fairy,” Khalid – “Young Dumb & Broke,” Rihanna ft. Jay-Z – “Umbrella,” Khalid – “Better,” Usher ft. Lil Jon & Ludacris – “Yeah!,” Nelly ft. Kelly Rowland – “Dilemma,” The Weeknd ft. Daft Punk – “Starboy.”
  • Purpose of the montage:
    • Demonstrate stylistic breadth (“all those flavors”).
    • Immediately connect classroom study to students’ everyday listening.
    • Foreshadow the claim that nearly all U.S. popular genres owe creative debt to African-American music.

Lecture Goals & Framing Statements

  • Title of lecture: “African-American Music: The Making and Shaping of an Indigenous Tradition.”
  • Key questions posed:
    • How do we describe African-American music?
    • In what contexts do we hear & recognize it?
    • How does environment dictate sonic evolution?
  • Central claim: African-American music functions as the United States’ primary indigenous musical system, supplying the “source & inspiration” for wider popular culture.

Macro-Timeline Chart (Three Tiers)

  • Chart organizes genres across 1600\text{s}\;\le\;t\;\le\;2000\text{s} under three headings:
    1. Sacred Traditions
    2. Secular Traditions (non-jazz)
    3. Secular Traditions – Jazz branch
  • Illustrative milestones (non-exhaustive):
    • 1600s–1700s: Spirituals (sacred) | Early syncopated dance & brass music (jazz tier)
    • 1800s: Slave/folk spirituals; ring shout; ragtime (late 19th c.)
    • 1900–1930s: Vaudeville & rural blues → urban (Chicago) blues; Great Migration accelerates spread.
    • 1940s: Bebop (NYC); rhythm & blues; freedom songs begin to surface.
    • 1950s: Rock ’n’ roll (1954 label formalized).
    • 1960s: Soul (soundtrack to Civil-Rights & Black-Nationalist movements); contemporary gospel boom.
    • 1970s: Hip-hop emerges in post-industrial Bronx; funk flourishes in Ohio & coastal metros.
    • 21st century: Continuation/expansion of all branches; impossible to cover comprehensively in one academic quarter.

Historical Context & Social Geography

  • Slavery as Institutional Bedrock (1600s–1865):
    • Music accompanies labor, worship, coded communication, resistance.
  • North vs. South Differences:
    • Northern colonies (e.g., NY, PA) host free Black communities earlier; abolitionist activity fosters somewhat different musical outlets.
    • Southern colonies depended on agricultural labor; musical practices reflect plantation life, higher African demographic density, stricter repression (e.g., drum bans).
  • Great Migration (1900-1970):
    • Movement of Southern Blacks to Midwest & North transports blues, gospel, & creates urban variants (e.g., Chicago blues, Harlem stride).

Sacred Lineage Highlights

  • Spirituals → Freedom Songs → Modern Gospel
    • Freedom songs often sung a cappella by Civil-Rights marchers; lyrics functioned as protest commentary.
    • Black Church (“main house” of Civil-Rights) naturally incubated community choirs, hence 1960s gospel surge.

Secular & Jazz Lineage Highlights

  • Early syncopated brass/“rag” music appears in Midwest river cities (St. Louis, Chicago) & Harlem.
  • Harlem Stride (“Black heaven”) demonstrates looser restrictions relative to South.
  • Bebop (1940s NYC) marks intellectual, small-ensemble turn in jazz, paralleling broader push for social equality.

Emergence of Soul, Funk, Hip-Hop

  • Soul as direct outgrowth of Civil-Rights/Black Power ethos.
  • Funk (Ohio + West Coast) & hip-hop (Bronx, \approx 1973$$) illustrate environmental determinism: post-industrial decay, block parties, DJ culture.
  • Contemporary R&B & rap charts (opening playlist) represent latest nodes on the same continuum.

Maultsby’s “Translated African Cultural & Musical Past” (Key Takeaways)

  • Enslaved Africans (17th c.) imported multiple cultural systems: languages, beliefs, folklore, performance arts.
  • Despite brutal Middle Passage, music & dance survived as portable culture.
  • Concept of “dancing the slaves”:
    • Slavers forced captives to exercise on deck; diaries list drums & proto-banjos as tools.
    • Early evidence of African instruments aboard ships.
  • Banjo genealogy: West-African antecedent → later central to U.S. folk, Bluegrass, early blues.

Atlantic Slave-Trade Routes & Commodities

  • Principal embarkation zones: Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Angola.
  • U.S. entry ports: Charleston (SC), Richmond (VA), etc.
  • Crop economy pairing: tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar, coffee, mining.

African Inflections on European Celebrations – Pinkster Day Case Study

  • Originally Dutch Pentecost festival; documented in 18th-c. New Amsterdam (NY).
  • James Fenimore Cooper observes thousands of Blacks “beating banjos… singing African songs… dancing on hollow-log drums.”
  • Example of African “prism” transforming European rite; foreshadows continual syncretism.

Tonal Languages & Musical Communication

  • Many West/Central African tongues are tonal; pitch changes alter semantic value.
    • Bambara example (Mali):
    • “My horse” = só (high tone)
    • “My house” = sò (low tone)
  • Linguistic tonality informs percussion: drum as speech surrogate—encoded messages intelligible only to in-group.

Stono Rebellion (South Carolina, 1739) & Drum Ban

  • Led by literate, Catholic Congolese slave Jimmy Cato.
  • Participants marched with firearms, banners, two drums, recruiting others through music.
  • After uprising crushed, 1740 legislation outlaws African drums; authorities recognize communicative power.

Creative Adaptation / Cultural Reversioning

  • Term proposed by Keyes: foregrounding African concepts in new circumstances.
  • Examples of adaptation when drums were banned:
    • Pattin’ Juba / Hambone: rhythmic body slapping (shoulders, thighs, chest) to mimic percussive texture.
    • Ring Shout: counter-clockwise circle dance; collective hand-clapping & foot work recreate drum pulse.
    • Song “Run, Jeremiah, Run” later provided as audio evidence.

Lawrence Levine on Culture (Quoted Framework)

“Culture is not a fixed condition, but a process… its resiliency is measured by the ability to react creatively and responsively to new situations.”

  • Keyes employs this definition to explain entire African-American musical arc, from slavery to hip-hop.

Body, Motion & Integrative Aesthetics

  • In many African languages there is no single word for ‘music’—sound, movement & festival are inseparable.
  • Core traits (Africa ↔ African-America):
    • Integrated singing, dancing, instrumentation.
    • Music tied to life-cycle rituals: birth, initiation, installation of leaders, funerals.
    • Omnipresence: everyday soundtrack rather than discrete concert activity.

Chronological Synthesis of Cultural Formation

  • 1600s (17th c.) – “Purest” African retention; majority Africans newly arrived.
  • 1700s (18th c.) – Rising interaction with Euro-Americans via missions, warfare → early creolization.
  • 1800s (19th c.) – Appearance of fully identifiable African-American culture; distinct genres named (spirituals, ragtime, brass bands).
  • 1900s → present – Explosion and global diffusion of genres (blues, jazz, R&B, gospel, rock, soul, funk, hip-hop, contemporary R&B/rap).

Key Take-Home Concepts

  • African-American music = dynamic, adaptive, community-centered process rooted in African aesthetics yet continually reshaped by U.S. socio-political realities.
  • Instruments, languages, and rituals survive via reversioning, even under repression (e.g., drum bans).
  • Environment (migration patterns, urbanization, industrial decline, social movements) dictates stylistic innovation.
  • Academic study must treat genres not as isolated styles but as interconnected nodes on a centuries-long continuum of cultural response.