American culture

African American music

The ancestors of today's African American population were brought to the United States as slaves, working primarily in the cotton plantations of the South. They were from hundreds of tribes across West Africa, and they brought with them certain traits of West African music including call and response vocals and complexly rhythmic music, as well as syncopated beats and shifting accents .

The African musical focus on rhythmic singing and dancing was brought to the New World, and where it became part of a distinct folk music culture that helped Africans "retain continuity with their past through music"; these polyrhythmic percussive practices using clapping, foot-stamping and other techniques (this was called patting juba), spread because drums were outlawed by slaveowners who feared they would be used in slave rebellions.

The first slaves in the United States sang work songs, field hollers and, following Christianization, hymns. In the 19th century, a Great Awakening of religious fervor gripped both blacks and whites across much of the country, especially in the South.

Protestant hymns written mostly by New England preachers became a feature of camp meetings held among devout Christians across the south. When blacks began singing sometimes adapted versions of these hymns, they were called Negro spirituals.

It was from these roots, of spiritual songs, work songs and field hollers, that blues and gospel developed. Shout bands also from the spiritual tradition but are distinct in that they adopt brass instruments in arrangements similar to gospel choirs.

Spirituals

Originally monophonic and a cappella, spirituals are antecedents of the blues. Spirituals were often improvised and used call-and-response vocals, in which a leader and a chorus alternated lines and refrain responses . David Ewen characterizes spirituals using "mobile changes from major to minor without the benefit of formal modulations; by the freedom of its rhythm and intonation; by its plangent moods; by the injection of notes, like the flatted third or seventh, foreign to the formal scale; by the variation of the rhythmic patterns".

Spirituals were primarily expressions of religious faith, sung by slaves on southern plantations. Secular songs that also fall within the genre sometimes contained hidden messages of a slaveowner’s unexpected return, or of rebellion or escape. "Follow the Drinking Gourd," for example, contained a coded map to the Underground Railroad, instructing escapees to follow the Big Dipper (the "drinking gourd.") "Wade in the Water" was another such song that combined religious imagery and codified instructions for potential runaways.

The first printed spiritual was "Roll, Jordan Roll", published in Philadelphia in 1862. It was followed by a few other publications, and the first spiritual collection, Slave Songs of the United States (1867). Spirituals had already spread out of the US South, however, with the travel of both blacks and whites, especially abolitionists.

In 1871, Fisk University became home to the Jubilee Singers, a pioneering group that popularized spirituals across the country. In imitation of this group, gospel quartets arose, followed by increasing diversification with the early 20th century rise of jackleg and singing preachers, from whence came the popular style of gospel music.