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African Influences in the Development of American Music as Illustrated in Early Delta Blues Performances
A Lesson plan for classes in American Studies, African-American Studies or History of Popular Music/Jazz
By Ralph Eastman
American popular music has become the most influential in the world. This lesson surveys African musical influences and how they served in major part to create this uniquely American musical form. With the proliferation of recordings and media, these influences have become thoroughly absorbed into all categories of mainstream popular music. However, an examination of early blues music produced in the Mississippi Delta area of the American south provides an especially good example of how these forces originally began their synthesis with European musical traditions.
To begin lesson (Charley Patton's "Revenue Man Blues").
Slave traders brought millions of African men, women and children to America virtually since the continent's first settlement. Because of its relative proximity to the America, many Africans bound into slavery came from the regions of West Africa . Slave holders actively sought to destroy prior tribal allegiances as well as other vestiges of things African in order to reduce cohesion among slaves that might lead to rebellion. Slaves could bring few actual objects of the lost African life with them in the difficult western passage of the slave ships. They did, however, carry with them many memories or retentions of African culture, tradition and religion. To assure spiritual as well as physical survival, African slaves learned to adapt their knowledge to the conditions of the New World.
Letters and diaries exist in which eighteenth and nineteenth century American and European travelers in the American south recorded their impressions of the "wild and primitive" music of black slaves. Some writers mentioned the strong emotive power of the dissonant singing. All, however, dismissed the music as a curious and bizarrely spontaneous expression of a primitive people. Naturally, music that retained so many African sensibilities sounded strange to these reporters accustomed to European standards for music. In part, African-American music did not seem "pretty" or "proper" to Europeans because its form and structure aspired to a completely different set of standards. Therefore, listeners who evaluated it in European terms and found it lacking were doing the equivalent of comparing apples and oranges.
African Retentions
For this discussion, the primary difference between European and African conventions in music is that European music is polyphonic (composed of the juxtaposition of many complimentary and contradictory tones)Bach music sample ] while African music is polyrhythmic (composed of the juxtaposition of many complimentary and contradictory rhythms)African drumming sample ]. This is not to say that rhythm was excluded from the former or tone and melody from the latter. Rather, each culture focused and organized its approach to making music around a different central property. It is important to remember that the African retentions surveyed here tend to be more concerned with rhythm than with tone.
As the focus of African music is rhythmic rather than tonal, it ought come as no surprise that, when considering tone, traditional African musicians were more interested in the variety of possible shadings around it than in replicating the pure tone itself. This caused notes to sound "fuzzy" or imprecise to Western trained ears. (Instrument sound samples: Reed Shaker , Thumb drums ) Further, the modal scales that Africans employed did not fit precisely into the standard European diatonic scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do). In order to accommodate to the tuning of European instruments, black American musicians created the so-called "blue notes" (the flatted fifth and seventh notes of the eight note diatonic scale). With stringed instruments, American players purposely ran knife blades or annealed bottle neck "slides" along the metal strings of the fretboard to distort or extend the "pure" tones that instruments were designed to produce. Often instead of, or in addition to, regular strumming, bluesmen slapped and pulled at guitar, fiddle or bass strings to increase this "dissonant" effect.
Many Western African languages differ from European ones in that they are tonally based. This means that a word is given its final meaning both by its sound and the pitch at which it is spoken. Louisiana slave owners banned slaves from possessing drums out of fear that slave would use them for unauthorized communication with one another. The slave owners assumed that slaves would send messages in a primitive form of Morse code. The truth was far more interesting and more formidable: By striking different areas of the drum, drummers could recreate the actual pitches of the words of Western African languages! African drums and talking drums for more information on this subject.) English speaking American bluesmen frequently used the "voice" of their guitars to complete sung or spoken vocal lines in songs.
Given that many of the slaves' native languages were tonal, there was a much closer link between the concepts of "speaking" and "singing." In such African societies, music and song were not experienced as being separate from life and work and, therefore, work and communal activities were organized by musical rhythms. American slaves and chain gang workers used "work songs" for coordinating proper and safe sequencing in group labor. The stressed beats or words of the chant signaled specific parts of the labor. The leader would (call) sing one line and the rest of the group would sing the answering line (response) in unison as they performed the particular task, such as rowing, laying railroad track or chopping trees. In this context, slaves sang less as an expression of misery at their indenture than as a means of orchestrating their forced labors. In this way, African work songs and European sea shanties are analogous: They both used song rhythms as a precise means for coordinating labor. This "call and response" pattern is now common in popular music, i.e., a lead vocalist sings a line which the rest of backing singers answer in chorus.
Slaves and, later, sharecroppers used also modal "field hollers" ("arhoolies") as a means of controlling their draft animals or communicating with other workers in adjoining fields. These a cappella cries are likewise descended from African musical traditions and retained their functional purpose. Many later blues musicians appropriated this type of "wild" vocalizing as their preferred singing style.
The South has a long tradition of slave and free black musicians entertaining audiences of both races. As most slave musicians were untrained in European musical conventions, much of the training was either "by ear" or by one folk musician to another. Musicians either had to build their own instruments or, more commonly, adapt existing European instruments for their purposes. Essentially, these folk musicians approached the playing of European instruments with an African consciousness, thereby synthesizing a new form of music.
In the post-Civil War rural south, African-American men had very few job options: They could be laborers, field hands, share-croppers or musicians. Understandably, the successive callings of minstrel, songster and bluesman quickly became established professions. While the itinerant musician's life was less back breaking than that of a laborer's, a professional bluesman needed to have both substantial instrumental and performing skills as well as a vast reserve of songs and the improvisational skills necessary to create new ones instantly. He further needed the physical stamina to play and sing all night long. This is because the blues was a celebratory music, played to accompany dancers reveling at rowdy all-night country dances. These "frolics" retained elements of African tribal dance and, unlike the carefully circumscribed social dance practices of Europe, individual dances could become extended affairs, often an hour or more long. The bluesman served as a "living jukebox" and each song/performance had to last as long as participants wanted to dance. Obviously, at this stage of the folk process, neither individual "songs" nor the musical form of the blues itself could exist in a final, fixed state. One of the defining talents for a professional rural bluesman in the first decades of this century was the ability indefinitely to sustain a single performance by improvising new verses and instrumental figures. This required that blues performers' conceptions of both "song" and musical form be sufficiently elastic to allow for the accomodation of such improvisition to expand their musical ideas in performance. Because of this practical necessity and the fact that notions of copyright were absent from this vernacular music, many songs in the repertoire of recorded blues reveal performers' familiarity with, and heavy reliance on, one another for both lyrical and instrumental inspiration.
The blues solidified into a recognizable form (12 measures or "bars" and AAB rhyming structure) sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Because the music was a vernacular form occurring before the advent of sound recording, it is impossible to state the precise year of its birth. However, by the late 1920's, companies began to discover a small but lucrative market among southern African-Americans for recordings of rural blues performances. The short playing time of a 78 rpm record side artificially compressed these extended performances into what record listeners, many more familiar with European Art or popular song models than with African-derived music, mistook for the three minute long "song" form. Increasingly, listeners viewed these forced abridgements as the final, fixed versions of a particular "song," something their creators never intended. With commercialization, the "art" of blues performance suddenly became separated from, and elevated above, its actual function in its indigenous culture. This new duality ultimately caused blues music to undergo many changes as, over the course of this century, it left its purely folk realm and ventured into more mainstream arenas.
The blues was never the province of solitary old men on back porches. In their way, critics who thought this have misunderstood the purpose and function of the music in much the same way as did the ante-bellum observers. While the blues may feature harsh and "mournful" sounding performances of downbeat lyrics, its totality is nonetheless a raucous, crude, ironic and rhythmic dance music. Listeners who insist that the blues are sad neglect the fact that the generic melancholy of typical blues lyrics is almost always juxtaposed with a sprightly, up-tempo instrumental accompaniment and performance style that belies the lyrical contents. The blues is the catalyst that brings temporary relief from a life of drudgery, not a catalog of those drudgeries.
The most famous Delta bluesmen who left recordings of their performances were Charlie Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. Charlie Patton was the inspiration for his generation of Mississippi bluesmen. Patton's harsh and powerful voice allowed him to project over the chaos of weekend dances. With his guitar and vocal prowess supported by uninhibited performance antics that pre-dated Jimi Hendrix by thirty five years, Patton was the undisputed star of the area around Cleveland, Ms. On record, Patton's clearest African retentions are his inventively rhythmic use of his guitar, use of syncopation and of scales with fewer principal notes than in the standard diatonic.
Though a far less proficient guitarist than Patton, Eddie "Son" House is noted for the African retentions of his savagely percussive instrumental attack, slashing bottleneck fretting style and dramatic singing. Patton recommended House to the Paramount Recording Company for whom he made only eight powerful and haunting record sides. House was a sometime preacher who constantly struggled with the moral perils of his bluesman's tumultuously secular life instead of that of the sanctified true believer. Nonetheless, experts consider him to be the Delta's greatest blues singer. Recorded after his rediscovery in the 1960's, "Death Letter Blues " suggests the ferocity of House's early work.
Robert Johnson was a student of Patton and House whose fame outshone that of both his masters. His precocious mastery as a singer, songwriter and guitarist coupled with his mysterious and premature death made Johnson a legendary figure far beyond the Delta. Keith Richards, songwriter and guitarist for The Rolling Stones, once likened the complexity of the rhythms in, and the execution of, Johnson's recorded performances to that of composer J. S. Bach. Years after the bluesman's death, when musicians like Richards and Eric Clapton found that his rhythms naturally adapted themselves to rock and roll, they bought Johnson's music to new generations of fans. " Crossroads Blues " is easily Robert Johnson's best known song. for more on Robert Johnson.
When the great out-migration of African-Americans from the Delta to Chicago and the cities northward along the Illinois Central Railroad line began during the Depression, musicians traveled along with their audiences. They soon discovered that, although the newly urbanized African-American audiences still loved their music, acoustic instrumentation was not sufficiently loud either to overcome or reflect the din of modern city life. Fans quickly came to regard solo acoustic performances as old fashioned. Enterprising musicians switched to electric guitars, added drums and further amplified their sound. Among others, musicians like Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) and Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnette) created and personified the new "Chicago Blues" style. Both men were raised in or near the Mississippi Delta and grew up hearing performances and recordings of Patton, House and Johnson. In maturity, both "electrified" their beloved Delta blues to bring them to new generations and races of people.
As a result of this folk process, the music was no longer African nor European: It was a vital new hybrid -- a truly American music forged in the rural South. In the intervening years, mass acceptance of all the African retentions described here -- polyrhythmic music, harsh emotional vocalizing, note bending and slurring, "call and response" vocal patterning -- has caused them to be absorbed into the basic language of mainstream popular music throughout the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Epstein, Dena J. 1977. Sinful tunes and spirituals . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Evans, David. 1982. Big road blues: Tradition and creativity in the folk blues . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferris, William. 1978. Blues from the delta . Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday.
Murray, Albert. 1976. Stomping the blues . New York: McGraw-Hill.
Oliver, Paul. 1970. Savannah syncopators: African retentions in the blues . New York: Stein and Day.
Palmer, Robert. 1981. Deep blues . New York: The Viking Press.
Ralph Eastman
Mt. San Antonio College
Walnut, California
