People traveled from many countries and cultures to what would eventually become the United States. Some came from Europe, where they were persecuted and impoverished, and found themselves making America safe from the Americans—those people Columbus bumped into. Some came from western Africa, and were guaranteed full employment for themselves and their children’s children, as we know. The Africans brought with them a culture quite different from that of Europeans, though much of it was obliterated to ensure control on the plantation. Their languages, dress, and religion were suppressed, their families broken up, their drums prohibited.
The African culture went underground, took on disguises, metamorphosed, and resurfaced in an American version. West African music re-emerged as spirituals, “field hollers,” and other new forms that would change the face of music in North America and ultimately around the world. African music adapted to American life, assimilating influences from White America just as Whites, especially in the South, assimilated West African influences into their music.
It’s normal for neighbors to absorb something of each other’s culture. In the case of a land newly settled by various uprooted populations, there is exceptional cultural dislocation and mutation. Africans absorbed the widest array of influences of any group in America. Snatched from their homeland, their culture driven underground, they looked to their new surroundings for anything that would sustain them. This was true throughout the Americas; in North America and particularly in New Orleans they blended influences from French, Spanish, German and English colonizers, as well as Native Americans and, of course, Africa.[1]
1] Other overlapping sectors of American society have made
major contributions that have been forgotten, suppressed, or distorted;
one might mention women, workers, and gays, for starters.
The suppression of African culture made Black innovation inevitable. In music, religion, and so many other areas, African-Americans were forced to invent themselves anew, molding a new culture by combining the remnants of their roots with whatever they found around them. This helps explain why in the succeeding centuries it has usually been African-Americans who jostle us all into each new style of music, among other things. It is because their culture in this country is founded on innovation for survival.[2] European settlers retained more of their cultural birthright, which was modified over time to reflect their new circumstances and influences, including different climates, residence patterns, political structures, and the presence of new neighbors, such as African-Americans.
[2]Parallel examples can be found in the other African colonies
throughout the hemisphere, though they take different forms because
the suppression of their culture was different in form and degree.
African‑ and European‑Americans in the South interacted on a daily basis over three centuries; yet today we are basically unaware of the ways each culture influenced the other. It’s like trying to separate and identify the strands of the music at other cultural crossroads like the Balkans, Madagascar, or for that matter most of the western hemisphere, where European, African, and indigenous cultures collided and mixed in so many variations. Most people can hear the blues in rock and roll from the mid‑twentieth century, though I’m not so sure that remains true as we get further from those years. But what about, for example, the influence of slavery era field hollers on country music, via the hollers’ descendant, the blues? Who hears that?
Stephen Foster, John Philip Sousa and the White minstrels in blackface used the music of Blacks as their main source. Foster wrote about the Swannee River but never saw it. Michael Bolton, like the Righteous Brothers before him, while clearly white of skin tone, has some other color in his musical tone. But how “White” was the work of Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, or Judy Garland? How “Black” was the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Michael Jackson, or Prince? Did White America apprentice itself culturally to Black America?[i] Was the interaction between the cultures a musical theft, a commercial rip-off, a mutual borrowing, a sharing—or was it all of these and more? And what is it today?
If at any point it begins to grate on the reader that I repeatedly point out the race of individuals mentioned, I can relate. But I would quote jazz historian Gunther Schuller who, in his book, The Swing Era, explained such writing as a
way of documenting what is in fact a reality—one which black musicians know only too well, for they live with it day in and day out—while the average American suppresses and ignores it…every manifestation of [Blacks’] creativity—from minstrel music (mid-19th century), ragtime (turn of the century), jazz (first half of the 20th century) to rock and roll (the 1950s through the 1980s)—has been taken from them and commercialized by whites.[ii]
[i]Conway 1995, 85.
[ii]Schuller 1989, 200