Folk Music

African-American folk music embraces sacred songs known as spirituals and many kinds of secular music, both vocal and instrumental. These include work songs that regulated the rate of work, street cries, field "hollers" that enabled workers to communicate over long distances, lullabies, and various kinds of dance music—all known before the Civil War. The musical elements that characterized African music described by European traders in the early seventeenth century were common in African-American folk music.

Africans did not arrive in the New World culturally naked, despite many statements to that effect. Historians and anthropologists now agree that many elements of African culture converged with surrounding European influences to form a new African-American culture. In their free time, blacks continued to perform the songs and dances they had in Africa. Early contemporary descriptions depicted the same musical elements previously described in Africa: polyrhythms; a strained, rasping vocal quality; variable pitches; singing accompanied by bodily movement in which everyone participated; and the extremely common call-and-response form of singing, in which leader and chorus overlapped. African instruments also came to the New World: drums, banjo, a kind of flute, and the balafo, a kind of xylophone. Improvised satiric or derisive singing was used to regulate the rate of work in rowing, grinding grain, and harvesting, in both Africa and the Americas. Strong rhythms were accentuated by stamping, hand-clapping, and other percussive devices. Although European music shared some of these elements, contemporary observers emphasized the exotic qualities, not the similarities that were later cited erroneously as evidence of European origin. Until the invention of sound recording, the only means of preserving music was transcription into a notational system designed for European forms. In the process, many distinctive elements were lost, and what was transcribed looked like European music. Performance style and sound could not be captured, but until the mid-twentieth century, musicians tended to regard transcription as the equivalent of the music as it was performed.

African instruments reached the New World through the practice, common in the slave trade, of providing instruments aboard slave ships to encourage singing and dancing, a recognized means of combating depression, suicide, and revolt. As early as 1693, a slaving captain reported that music and dance provided exercise in a limited space, raising the captives' spirits. Some captains collected African instruments before sailing, thus transmitting African instruments to the New World.

When the Africans landed, concern for the continued health of their new possessions led some plantation owners to make efforts to acclimate them gradually to their new circumstances. Contemporary accounts describe the welcome of the new arrivals by older slaves, who sang and danced with them in a style characterized by Europeans as "exotic" or "barbaric." African instruments were described in the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century, but reports from the mainland came later because of the relatively small number of blacks there until the mid-eighteenth century. As early as February 18, 1755, the Virginia Gazette printed an advertisement for a runaway slave who played well on the "Banjar," while Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) described the "banjar, which they [blacks] brought hither from Africa."

The official report of the Stono, South Carolina, slave revolt of 1739 described "dancing, Singing and beating Drums" as the means used by the rebels to attract more blacks to their ranks. An African drum from Virginia was purchased in 1753 by the British Museum, where it remains today. In many mainland colonies the playing of drums or other loud instruments, being forbidden by law, was surreptitious, but drum-making continued; as late as the 1930s, it was observed in Georgia by Federal Writers' Project interviewers. In place of drums, other percussive devices were used to provide rhythmic support for singing and dancing—stamping, hand-clapping, and the less threatening sound of the banjo.

An African xylophone, the balafo (or barrafou), was reported in Virginia in 1775 by a schoolmaster, John Harrower, in his Journal, and in a news item in Purdie's Williamsburg Virginia Gazette in 1776. Blacks also learned to play European instruments such as the fiddle, the French horn, and the flute. As early as the 1690s, Accomack County records in Virginia reported a court case involving a slave fiddler. During the eighteenth century, reports of blacks fiddling for white dances were common, an indication of the progress of acculturation.

Most of the music blacks played for the dancing of whites consisted of conventional European country dances and minuets, but reports from the eighteenth century also described whites dancing "Negro jigs" as a change from the more formal dances. Published versions of these "jigs" show few African characteristics; how the music sounded in performance is conjectural.

With the beginning of evangelical efforts to convert blacks to Christianity in the mid-eighteenth century, reports of African dancing became less frequent except in New Orleans, where such activities continued into the nineteenth century in a specially designated area called Place Congo.

From a musical point of view, the characteristics of sacred and secular music were similar. In many instances, songs regulating work in the fields or on the water that originally had secular words were adapted to sacred texts when the singers joined churches that proscribed secular songs.

Learning to play European instruments and to sing Protestant hymns was part of a process of acculturation, along with learning the English language and the ways of the white captors. But African ways were not forgotten. Even though new arrivals from Africa virtually stopped in 1808, many old customs persisted in secret, rarely witnessed by the whites who were the primary source of contemporary reports. Political and social pressures also influenced these nineteenth-century accounts, tending to divide them into two patterns: either to describe the singing and dancing as proof that the slaves were happy, or to deny that the slaves had any secular music, depicting them as singing only hymns. Pro-slavery arguments and the minstrel-theater tradition fit into the first pattern, while the abolitionists tended to the latter. Neither pattern conformed fully to reality. Contemporary accounts of slaves singing and dancing demonstrate beyond dispute that increasingly acculturated secular music and dance continued without interruption, despite the undeniable suffering of the slaves.

Songs to regulate the rate of work in Africa were easily adapted to the fields of the New World for planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops, whether they were sugar, rice, indigo, corn, tobacco, or cotton. These songs frequently were a dialogue between a leader and a chorus, although the chorus could play a relatively minor role in providing a rhythmic background. Later, such songs were adapted to the pace of railroad gangs for laying track. This kind of singing was observed in southern prison camps, where isolation and long association led to a higher development of the relation between leader and chorus.

Incredible as it seems, a belief that blacks had no secular music coexisted with the immense popularity of the white minstrel theater, which, initially at least, purported to show plantation life. The early shows were relatively simple, and it is not known how much the early minstrels knew of slavery. Dan Emmett, the reputed composer of "Dixie," had toured the southern states in a circus, but the extent of his contact with blacks is unknown. Little has been written about black secular folk music in the post–Civil War era, but it must have thrived to have produced a generation of talented black performers who themselves played in minstrel shows and popular theater.

Another form of improvised folk music was the Blues. Its origins are obscure, but the blues probably developed among rural blacks during Reconstruction. In contrast to the spiritual, which was usually a group performance with solo and chorus alternating, the blues was a solitary expression of loneliness and misery. It incorporated some elements of the so-called field holler and the gapped scales, blue notes, and syncopation of African music. As improvised utterances, the earliest blues songs were never written down and were lost. By the time blues achieved publication and recording, it had become to some extent professional.

Collections of black folk songs, as distinct from spirituals, began to be published after World War I. Natalie Curtis Burlin edited the Hampton Series of Negro Folk Songs (1918-1919), based on the singing of students at the Hampton Institute. Camille Nickerson of New Orleans specialized in Creole French folk songs. John Wesley Work III produced an important collection, American Negro Songs and Spirituals, in 1940. A very different collection was Lawrence Gellert's Negro Songs of Protest (1936), described as "the living voice of the otherwise inarticulate resentment against injustice." Initially, such songs were received with suspicion as reflecting an outside political motivation, but the civil rights struggle of the 1960s testified to their legitimacy.

The civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in December 1955, produced a group of songs that played a more important role in a political and social movement than any since the anti-slavery songs of a century earlier. "We Shall Overcome," based at least in part on a spiritual, "No More Auction Block for Me," was only the most famous of the freedom songs that inspired and inspirited a great movement.

In southern Louisiana, French-speaking blacks had made their own music for many years, unnoticed by the world outside. Only in the post–World War II period did the whole country become aware of it, largely through sound recordings. Zydeco, as it is called, has not been published much, for little has been written down, but it has become known through recordings.

No form of popular music in the United States, commercial or noncommercial, has remained uninfluenced by black folk music—its rhythmic drive, syncopated beat, gapped scales, and blue notes. The potency of this influence is now worldwide.

In the era after the Civil War, spirituals became the dominant form of black music in the thinking of the general public, both in Europe and in North America, since many writers denied the existence of black secular folk music. This misconception was due in part to the influence among many blacks of religious sects that denounced secular music and dancing as sinful. The many reports of blacks who refused to participate in dancing or to sing anything but sacred songs persuaded many whites outside the South that blacks had no secular music.

The origins of the spiritual are still uncertain. Conversion of the slaves to Christianity proceeded very slowly in the eighteenth century because of the opposition of some slave owners who worried that baptism might interfere with work or even lead to freedom. Moreover, missionaries were few and plantations far apart. Gradually, ministers took an interest in converting slaves, who learned European psalms and hymns with alacrity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the camp-meeting movement brought whites and blacks together in large, emotional crowds where mutual influence in styles of singing was unavoidable. It is likely that a blending of African performance style with Protestant hymnody grew out of these encounters. The public in the North first became aware of spirituals through the concert tours in the 1870s of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other groups, such as the Hampton Singers.

Among very pious slaves, the only form of dancing permitted was the "shout," or holy dance, performed after a church service. Witnesses described it as a circle dance in which the legs were not crossed, while the feet edged backward and forward or right and left, without being lifted from the floor. Music was provided by a separate group of singers who "based" the dancing with "shout" songs or "running" spirituals (Epstein 1977, pp. 278-287).

See also Africanisms; Fisk Jubilee Singers; Folk Arts and Crafts; Folklore; Gospel Music; Music in the United States; Spirituals

Bibliography

Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867. Reprint, Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1995.

Courlander, Harold. Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Krehbiel, Henry Edward. Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music. New York: G. Schirmer, 1914.

Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England / Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. New York: W. W. North, 1997.

Walker, Wyatt Tee. Spirits That Dwell in Deep Woods: The Prayer and Praise Hymns of the Black Religious Experience. Chicago, IL: GIA Publications, 2004.

dena j. epstein (1996)
Updated bibliography