An Introduction to America’s Music

88 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

Yet the historical record shows that, these obstacles notwithstanding, African

Americans preserved at least some aspects of African traditions.

It is a mistake, of course, to speak of “African traditions” as if they formed a

monolithic whole—and the same is true of African American traditions. Africa at

the time of the slave trade embraced a huge number of distinct peoples, speak-

ing hundreds of languages, practicing myriad religions, and cultivating highly

contrasting approaches to music making. Moreover, African music, like Ameri-

can music, is a dynamic, living cultural force that has changed over time. For

these reasons, attempts to speculate on the sounds of slave music by drawing

parallels between present-day African and African American musical practices

pose insoluble problems for the music historian. Such efforts to fi ll gaps in the

historical record must be taken with a grain of salt.

Nonetheless, it is possible to hear in the informal music making of rural A fri-

can communities today certain commonalities with much African American

music:

• Music as a part of everyday life. Music can accompany all sorts of activities: work,
  play, worship, and ritual.


• Close interaction between performers and spectators. Unlike a typical Western con-
  cert milieu, music making may uphold little distinction between those who are
  playing and singing and those who are dancing, shouting encouragement, and
  otherwise participating in the musical moment.


• Call and response. In a responsorial or call-and-response texture, a leader’s
  musical phrase is answered (vocally or instrumentally) by the group. A lthough
  call and response is a musical pattern found throughout the world, it plays a
  particularly central role in much of both African and African American music.


• Emphasis on voices and percussion. Although a wide array of wind and string
  instruments are used, of greatest importance are voices and percussion instru-
  ments, including drums of all kinds, rattles, bells, and xylophones.


• Polyrhythm. In ensembles of drums and other percussion instruments, each
  instrument typically maintains a distinctive rhythmic pattern, which inter-
  locks with the other instruments’ rhythms to create a complex texture called
  polyrhythm.

Any of these musical tendencies, when found in music of the United States, may

be considered an Africanism. The story of how Africanisms came to be part

of the fabric of American music is necessarily speculative. But when histori-

ans carefully interpret what fragmentary historical record actually exists, that

record reveals much about black music before the Civil War.

TRADITIONAL AFRICAN AMERICAN

MUSIC MAKING

Present-day knowledge of the music of American slaves, as with earlier Ameri-

can Indian music, depends on accounts written by whites. One such account was

that of New Englander Lewis Paine. During the summer of 1841 he visited a local

musical Africanisms

172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 88 23/01/13 10:07 AM