WELCOME BACK!
Welcome to module two of the history of jazz. This week we examine African American music in the 19th century, music that was to influence all of the 20th century and is still influencing music today. This module will detail many of the tracks found in this week’s playlist as well as offering resources to help you explore these forms further. We will outline some important topics that we will need to understand as modern music, including the history of drums, work songs, protest songs, game songs, spirituals, shouts, ragtime, the insidious history of minstrelsy, and one of the most influential traditions of all time known as the blues.
Read through this page in its entirety, listening to each track and watching each off the embedded videos. If you have trouble with Spotify links (if you can only preview 30 seconds of the track) click on the name of the song to be taken to Spotify directly. There are also optional embedded links for citations, additional information, and an occasional surprise.
Learning Objectives
- To describe multiple forms of 19th century African American sacred and secular musics.
- To understand the complex influences of slavery on African American music.
- To connect 19th century African American music to modern styles.
- To understand examples of the coded meanings in spirituals.
CHALLENGES
One of the challenge of learning about music before the 20th century is that the technology needed to record sound did not exist – we have no recordings! The earliest recording machines were not invented until Thomas Edison created the phonograph in 1877. Then there were several decades before an industry was established to record and sell music that people could actually buy and take home, what we know today as the recording industry. Instead, we have to rely on printed music as well as written accounts by those that witnessed or participated in it.
The first commercial gramophones were produced in the 1890s and sold for around $25 to $30, that’s over $1000 in 2024 money. As technology improved and production costs decreased, the price of gramophones became a bit more more affordable, with some models selling for as little as $10 in the early 1900s ($330). What was recorded had a lot to do with who had the money to access the technology.
Another challenge is that African American music is rooted in the musical cultures of Africa. Africa of course is a continent, not a country. It is many times the size of the United States, and contains hundreds if not thousands of musical cultures that overtime fused into American music. We don’t want to simplify the West African influence, but we also don’t have space to explore it all here. To help, we will focus on the role of drums, migrations, and the further translation of African Culture into African American culture.
DRUMS
Our story begins centuries before recorded music, focusing on perhaps the most important instrument ever invented – the drum. Drums (and the rhythms played on them) have evolved into all manner of groove music across the globe.
Drumming though, as a form of communication may actually be older than humanity itself. In the early 1980s the biologist Christoph Boesch, conducting long- term studies of chimpanzees in the forest area of the Ivory Coast, discovered that when they split up into foraging parties, they remained within earshot of each other and communicated information about their travel direction and length of resting periods by drumming on logs. Many musics in Africa model drumming patterns directly on speech patterns, allowing them to serve musical as well as communicative roles.
EARLY INFLUENCES FROM THE ISLAMIC WORLD
The complexities of slavery and its effects on modern music reach deep into the past. As Sylviane A. Diouf writes, 19th century African American music conjures up images of “cotton fields, oppressed sharecroppers, chain gangs, pain, and lonesomeness. When one thinks about a music so embedded in rural African American culture, Islam certainly does not come to mind. Yet it should because some of the deepest roots of the blues grew not in the Mississippi Delta but thousands of miles away, in the Islamic belt of West Africa.”
Music in North Africa was distinctly different from music in the Middle East, having been influenced by the indigenous black populations living in the southern parts of the Maghreb and later by non-Muslim victims of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Often employed as musicians, these enslaved West Africans brought their music and rhythms to North Africa. In western Sahel, especially in the urban zones, Muslims adopted, adapted, and transformed the Islamic musical style. Much cross-fertilization occurred on both sides of the desert.
Around the year 1000, Islamic kingdoms (using armies of Senagalese slaves) incorporated large numbers of the slaves drums in battles with the Europeans. It was so effective that it influenced all of the armies of Europe to include military drums, although frowning upon them in its concertized music. These instruments that were appropriated into marching and military bands are many of the same the ones we still have in the United States. As Sublette describes:
In 1086, responding to a call from the taifa kings of Sevilla and Badajoz to defend al-Andalus after the Christians had taken Toledo and began exacting tribute, the Almorávides invaded Iberia…The Almorávides used slave armies. These had been a characteristic feature of Muslim military campaigns; what was different about the Almorávides’ army was that much of it was black. Some blacks had been present in Muslim military campaigns in Spain from the time of Tārik’s conquest, but the Almorávides brought thousands of black Sudanese to serve as soldiers. With them came an African weapon that the Castilians had never before seen: Drums. The sound of these black Moors’ drums (which may have been kettle-drums, though we don’t know for certain) was intense and frightening. Drums not only intimidated the defending soldiers and terrorized the population when besieging a city, they also called the forces of the supernatural to carry the attackers to victory.
Drums were amplifiers of speech. The “talking” function of African drums was put to use in battle, giving commands that all soldiers could hear. The Almorávides used war drums in combination with another innovation, banners, to create a tactic of disciplined mass action, signaling moves to the troops as they advanced in a compact, rhythmic, lethal column. (Cuba and Its Music p. 64-65) )
But drums are also used for other purposes besides battle: they are central to various cultures religious and spiritual practices, courting and mating rituals, and countless types of daily work. Drums, and the rhythms played on other instruments to emulate them, are often connected directly to these important contexts: speech, war, love, and work.
An important instrument in this history is the djembe – a hand drum played in the clip below. It is a predecessor of other drums such as the conga drum and bongo.
12/8
One of the important elements from African rhythm is what we refer to in notation as 12/8 – a central musical beat counted in groups of four (that you could move your feet to), but with each big beat comprised of three smaller beats.
In this video the beat is represented by a wheel – like a clock with 12 divisions. Watch the circle on the left and see if you can start to hear the quick “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12”:
This rhythm combines twos and threes, 2×2=4, 3×4=12 – tapping this pattern with alternating hands creates a polyrhythm (right-left-right + left-right-left). We can hear this 6/8 feeling in both Omou Sangare’s song “Djoukourou” from2017, as well as Stevie Wonder’s 1972 “Isn’t She Lovely”:
This 12/8 rhythmic feeling will become the core of jazz music’s most defining aspect – swing. A type of groove that is layered with polyrhythm all built upon the 12/8 relationships.
THE ECONOMY BUILT ON SLAVERY
Between 1619 and 1886, generations of enslaved Africans (free labor to their enslavers), helped created a global economy bolstered by the rapidly expanding markets for cotton, sugar, coffee, and mining. Especially in the 1800s, incredible economic growth and wealth was created by those forced to live and die in slave labor camps throughout the Americas and Caribbean. Their work planting and harvesting cotton in the United States in particular led to an economic “boom” in Europe and the textile manufacturing industries tied to it, especially in England’s rapidly expanding textile industry.
An act of Congress passed in 1800 made it illegal for Americans to engage in the slave trade between nations, primarily because it undercut the market value of slaves already owned by Americans who depended on them for collateral and credit. “Property” was an asset that could be leveraged, but continued importation of forced migrants would have a negative impact on enslavers by lowering the perceived market value of a slave. This led to growth in the domestic slave trade vs the transatlantic slave trade.
An important distinction thus arose in the American slave market that is reflected in the differences in music between the United states and the Caribbean. The brutality of sugar manufacturing in Cuban and Haitian slave labor camps often led to death and a continuous need for new workers to be taken across the Atlantic Ocean to sustain sugar production. Conversely, Africans in the United states were compelled to wed and have offspring – the children of the enslaved becoming additional “property” of the slave master. This reality became all the more tragic when families would be routinely broken apart through sale. Therefore, Africans in Cuba and Brazil were continually bringing elements of African culture to some areas, while after 1800 African Americans were more isolated from their original culture. After a few generations people who were originally African had become African Americans born in North America.
The expansion of slavery was deemed necessary to further economic growth in the southern states and the expanding west of the United States by a minority of the population – slave owners and industrialists vastly outnumbered in the increasingly abolitionists country but yet held to power and influence regardless. The conflict over this expansion eventually lead to secession and the American Civil War (1861-1865).
From Baptist – The Half Has Never Been Told (481):
Dependence on cotton stretched far beyond North American shores. A world greedy for a slice of the whipping-machine’s super-profits had financed the occupation of the continent, and the forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the southwestern cotton fields helped to make the modern world economy possible. The steadily increasing productivity of hands on the cotton frontier kept cheap raw materials flowing to the world’s newest and most important industry, the cotton textile factories of Britain, Western Europe, and the North. Theft of days, years, labor, of the left hand’s creative secrets helped provide the escape velocity for the fledgling modern world to do what no other historical society had done before and pull away from the gravitational field of the Malthusian cul-de-sac. Slavery’s expansion was the driving force in US history between the framing of the Constitution and the beginning of the Civil War. It made the nation large and unified, and it made the South’s whites disproportionately powerful in that nation. Enslavers had turned right hand against left to achieve not only productivity but also power that few other dominant classes in human history had possessed. Yet from the epic of theft and survival, of desire and innovation, came the Civil War, too. Expansion’s profits and power made southerners willing to push for more expansion. This made some northern whites into allies who recognized their dependence on cotton profit and were willing to do what was necessary to keep it flowing. These were southern whites’ allies. But southern power frightened other northern whites. Some feared that slavery, acceptable enough when it remained a southern institution, would invade the places they lived or wanted to live. Others believed that slavery corrupted everything, and that its expansion fed the rot in American society, American freedom, the American soul—whatever category was their touchstone for everything good. Still others believed that the financial disasters of the late 1830s and early 1840s showed that slavery was economically derelict, doomed, a drag on the capitalist economy’s future.
DRUMS IN NORTH AMERICA – CONGO SQUARE
While enslaved Africans were not allowed to bring drums with them to the New World, they did bring their musical knowledge and their music, the ability to improvise keep alive important rhythms played on drums they created upon arrival. This collective cultural memory informed the great musical traditions of the Americas, reflected in the numbers of Africans taken to North America, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, Mexico, and many other countries.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, new “Ordinances of Police” specified that the mayor should appoint places for slaves to dance on Sundays, the one day of rest allowed for the enslaved in New Orleans (we will cover this important city extensively in next week’s module). Travelers frequently described these dances at what is now called Congo Square, sometimes giving details of the steps and accompanying instruments. In 1819, Benjamin Latrobe, the engineer who had supervised the rebuilding of the Capitol after the War of 1812, described what he saw on a Sunday afternoon:
They were formed into circular groups … The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument … On the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash … A man sung an uncouth song … which I suppose was in some African language, for it was not French … The allowed amusements of Sunday have, it seems, perpetuated here those of Africa.
Original gatherings and displays of African culture are still celebrating today in New Orleans with modern drum circles forming in what was Congo Square for yearly percussion festivals.
THE TRESILLO RHYTHM
One important rhythm that appeared in Congo Square is known today as the “tresillo” translated in Spanish as little three. This is a- a long-long-short pattern that can be heard in countless forms of music, becoming associated with most of the music created in New Orleans in the early 20th Century, and is prevalent in countless forms of Afro-Latin musics as well. The pattern is a new combination of the threes and twos we explored above in the 12/8 rhythm.
This rhythm that was documented over two hundred years ago is everywhere in popular music. Here is a quick tour of just some of the music in which it appears:
THE BANNING OF DRUMS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF RHYTHM
The first determinative episode in the history of African American music can be found in a significant eighteenth-century incident. On September 9, 1739, enslaved people from the kingdom of Kongo (which covered parts of today’s Congo and Angola) staged an uprising in Stono, South Carolina. Their goal was to reach St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, where the authorities guaranteed freedom to any runaway. As Sylviane A. Diouf describes, they marched with “Colours displayed and two Drums beating.” As their numbers grew, they “set to dancing, singing, and beating drums to draw more Negroes to them.” In the end, the uprising resulted in twenty whites killed and over forty Africans. The following year, South Carolina passed a law that stipulated:
It is absolutely necessary to the safety of this province, that all due care be taken to restrain the wanderings and meetings of negroes and other slaves, at all times, and more especially on Saturday nights, Sundays and other holidays, and their using and carrying wooden swords, and other mischievous and dangerous weapons, or using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments which may call together, or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs or purposes.
This prohibition remained in place until the abolition of slavery.
Thus in America, as it had been earlier in the West Indies, the beating of drums by slaves was often forbidden by law. White colonists feared the enslaved having the ability to communicate with drums despite being used in only 2 out of 313 uprisings.
Yet despite this ban, which was rigorously enforced, drumming continued unseen by the authorities. Former slaves in Georgia described how to make drums from hollow trees and recalled dancing to drums, which must have been done in secret. Other rhythmic support to dancing was provided by hand clapping, foot stomping, and a practice unique to the United States, known as “patting Juba.”
Patting Juba (Juba was also a form of dance) was an extension of simple hand clapping, raising it to the level of a self-contained accompaniment to dancing. It was described as striking the hands on the knees, then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left with the other—all the while keeping time with the feet and singing. The earliest reference to the practice dates from the 1820s, but by the 1830s serious attention was being paid to its rhythmic complexities. This form also evolved into the “hambone” and body percussion traditions still practiced today by artists such as Bobby McFerrin and Danny Barber:
MUSIC THAT SPEAKS THE TRUTH
The African tradition of improvised derisive singing was easily adapted to the American scene. Improvising satire, sometimes too subtle to be recognized, and making fun of the master and his family in ways that did not provoke offense were a subversive form of protest embedded in the music, and specialties of the African American improviser. Satiric verses could easily be inserted in work songs, boat songs, or corn songs, and into the ritual of Patting Juba as heard in these lyrics:
Juba this and Juba that
Juba killed a yellow cat
And get over double trouble, Juba.
We pick the corn, you give us the husk
We cook the bread, you give us the crust.
We fry the meat, you give us the skin
And that’s where my Mama’s trouble begins.
When Europeans were present, the entertainment usually involved a more subtle satire, which permitted the expression in song of ideas that otherwise might have been severely punished. It also begins the popular music tradition of coded language, inuendo, and slang that infuses a generations’ musical expression.
TRANSLATED AFRICAN CULTURE
What did the music of African Americans sound like in the antebellum United States? How was it integrated into daily life? What was unique about it? Some of the most important African American musical forms are described below – work songs, ring shouts, game songs, and sacred music, transforming after the civil war into blues, ragtime, and giving birth to the first form of large- scale American popular entertainment known as minstrelsy.
I. WORK SONGS
“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as work. A silent slave is not liked by masters or overseers.”
– Frederick Douglass
Excerpts from Timeline of African American Music:
Singing is an integral part of daily life for many African communities. Wether voluntary or forced, it also became a fixture on board slave ships and the unending cycles of work occurring on plantations in the antebellum south. These improvised songs, known as work songs, field calls (also field hollers) and street calls (also street cries) served many functions. Singing passed the time, coordinated the movements of workers and offered encouragement. They also communicated human emotions and provided a forum for criticizing whites in positions of authority.
“When rowing in canoes…[the rowers] generally sing the whole time, and one of the passengers accompanies the song with a small drum. One of the rowers sings a couplet, somewhat in a recitative voice, which is closed by a chorus in which they all join.”
– Thomas winter bottom, physician working in Sierra Leone, West Africa, from 1792 to 1796
“The [dozen stout rowers] negroes struck up a song to which they kept time with their oars; and our speed increased as they went on…The words were rude enough, the music better, and both were well-adapted to the scene. A line was sung by a leader, then all joined in a short chorus; then came another solo line, and another short chorus.”
– Passenger on a boat traveling the johns river in Florida in 1835
As Africans in America, the enslaved retained many customs of the past, which remained relevant after the abolition of slavery. While working long hours in the cotton and tobacco fields or clearing brush, husking and grinding corn, cutting wood, rowing boats, and laying railroad tracks, and as stevedores and fishermen, they sang work songs to pass the time, relieve boredom, and coordinate the movements of repetitive manual labor. Many work crews had song leaders who improvised a line, to which the others responded with a refrain. This singing style is heard in “Stewball” by a work group at Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) in 1936.
Barlow in Looking Up At Down, The Emergence of Blues Culture reminds us of the connection of work songs to slavery and provides insight from Frederick Douglass:
Work songs were generally encouraged by the slave owners, who saw them as means of increasing the slaves’ work output and maintaining their morale. For the slaves, however, the nature of their work was punishment, not self-fulfillment. As Frederick Douglass explained, their use of work songs was linked to their resignation or resistance to forced labor:
Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave is not liked by masters or overseers. . . .This may account for the almost constant singing heard in the southern states. . . .I have often been utterly astonished, since I came north, to find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slaves represent the sorrows of his life; and he is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least such is my experience.
These musical forms and traditions continued past the civil war and into the 20th century, as the failures of reconstruction gave rise to Jim Crow-era work farms and the modern for-profit prison system. Leasing workers from the state, many industries often relied on, and profited from, large amounts of low-cost African American labor. These polices stemming from the 13th amendment used new racially motivated criminal statues in order to re-enslave African Americans.
JOHN AND ALAN LOMAX
One of the great resources we have that helps us get an idea of how some of these work songs might have sounded like comes from folk music historians John and Alan Lomax, who in the early 20th century were able to take recording machines to remote regions in the south, including prisons such as the infamous Parchman Farm in Mississippi, and record hundreds of examples of work songs used by large groups of incarcerated African-Americans. All of the Lomax’s work is available at the extensive John and Allen Lomax Archive here. We can hear in these examples how tools such as hammers are used like percussion instruments to accent a collective beat, one who’s tempo (speed) reflects the heaviness of the labor.
“Early In the Mornin´” recorded by Alan Lomax. Performers unknown. Prison Songs Vol. 1 (1947)
Allen Lomax recorded at a song at Parchman Farm entitled “Rosie” where we can hear a song leader calling out a lyric, and responded to by the whole group. This call and response is accompanied by the sound of axes chopping on the first of every four beats:
Nina Simone later transformed this song into a haunting song about a woman and an unfaithful man, entitled “Be My Husband” in 1965:
Work songs have endured to this day and have been used by artists such as Max roach and Abby Lincoln in their landmark track “Driva’ Man”, (1961), and modernized by the Cannonball Adderley quintet into “The Work Song” (1960).
II. RING SHOUTS
Otherwise known as just a “shout “, the ring shout was an informal form of sacred music that featured a circular dance accompanied by makeshift percussion instruments, foot stomps, and hand claps often forming a repetitive tresillo rhythm to support the dancers.
The most well-known group keeping the history of the shout and its people alive is the Mcintosh County Shouters descendants of The Gullah-Geechee people – African Americans who were born, bred, and educated along the coastal regions of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. They are the descendants of enslaved people brought from West Africa to work on isolated coastal plantations, growing rice, indigo, and sea island cotton.
Ring shout’s roots go back to traditions common to Central and West Africa. The origins of the ring shout came with them when enslaved people were brought to America in the 1700s. Drums and drumming were not allowed on plantations in Coastal Georgia during slavery; plantation owners feared it could be used to signal an outburst or uprising. Instead, the Gullah-Geechee would keep the rhythm for percussion by clapping their hands, tapping their feet, and beating the floorboards with a wooden stick.
The stick man set the beat, then he or another male lead songster would begin to sing out the first lines of the shout. The women (shouters) moved in a counterclockwise circle, singing back or shouting the responses while pantomiming the lyrics.
Ring shouts often followed a church service. As a form of worship that blended both African and Christian elements, it was a way for enslaved people to honor their African ancestors and traditions. The shout also provided an essential form of communication for enslaved people to send messages to each other that the white plantation owners couldn’t understand.
McIntosh Country Shouters perform “Adam in the Garden”
III. SPIRITUALS
In the 19th century sacred music, including spirituals, was one of the few permitted forms of musical expression allowed to enslaved African-Americans. Many of these are of course still well-known today. While these songs maybe used as a part of a religious ceremony or ritual, they also contained coded messages used by enslaved African-Americans to assist those seeking to escape to freedom in the north or into Canada.
Some of these encoded messages were general while others were quite specific such as in the lyrics to “follow the drinking gourd”. This song uses stars in the sky, the big dipper, relating it to an object used to drink water common in the 19th century. The bowl of the big dipper points north, the song instructing slaves to follow the stars in order to head north to freedom. Read more about it here.
| LYRICS | EXPLANATION |
| VERSE 1 | Taken together, this verse suggests escaping in the spring and heading North to freedom. |
| When the sun come back, | Refers to the winter or spring. The days are getting longer, and the angle of the sun is higher each day at noon. |
| When the firs’ quail call, | Refers to the breeding season. Quail in Alabama start calling to each other in early to mid-April. |
| Then the time is come | |
| Foller the drinkin’ gou’d. | The “drinkin’ gou’d” alludes to the hollowed out gourd used by slaves (and other rural Americans) as a water dipper. Used here it is a code name for the Big Dipper star formation, which points to Polaris, the Pole Star, and North. |
| CHORUS | |
| Foller the drinkin’ gou’d, | |
| Foller the drinkin’ gou’d; | |
| For the ole man say, | “Ole man” is nautical slang for “Captain” (or “Commanding Officer.”) According to Parks, the Underground Railroad operative Peg Leg Joe was formerly a sailor. |
| “Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.” | |
| VERSE 2 | Describes how to follow the route, from Mobile, Alabama north. |
| The riva’s bank am a very good road, | The first river in the song is the Tombigbee, which empties into Mobile Bay. Its headwaters extend into northeastern Mississippi. |
| The dead trees show the way, | According to Parks, Peg Leg Joe marked trees and other landmarks “with charcoal or mud of the outline of a human left foot and a round spot in place of the right foot.” (1) |
| Lef’ foot, peg foot goin’ on, | |
| Foller the drinkin’ gou’d. | |
| CHORUS | |
| VERSE 3 | Describes the route through northeastern Mississippi and into Tennessee. |
| The riva ends a-tween two hills, | The headwaters of the Tombigbee River end near Woodall Mountain, the high point in Mississippi and an ideal reference point for a map song. The “two hills” could mean Woodall Mountain and a neighboring lower hill. But the mountain itself evidently has a twin cone profile and so could represent both hills at once. |
| Foller the drinkin’ gou’d; | |
| ‘Nuther riva on the other side | The river on the other side of the hills is the Tennessee, which extends outward in an arc above Woodall Mountain. The left-hand side proceeds virtually due north to the Ohio river border with Illinois – definitely the preferred route, since the right hand side meanders back into northern Alabama and then proceeds up into Tennessee. |
| Follers the drinkin’ gou’d. | |
| CHORUS | |
| VERSE 4 | Describes the end of the route, in Paducah, Kentucky. |
| Wha the little riva | When the Tennessee… |
| Meet the grea’ big un, | …meets the Ohio River. The Tennessee and Ohio rivers come together in Paducah, KY, opposite southern Illinois. |
| The ole man waits– | Per one of Parks’s informants, the runaways would be met on the banks of the Ohio by the old sailor. Of course, the chances that Peg Leg Joe himself would be there to meet every escapee (as depicted literally in the children’s books) are quite small. |
| Foller the drinkin’ gou’d. |
Saxophonist John Coltrane re-imagined this song in 1961, changing the title to “Song of the Underground Railroad”, setting it as a high-energy ensemble piece with an explosive solo improvisation. Based on the energy of this track, what could you imagine Coltrane’s feelings were toward the song’s subject?
THE FISK JUBILEE SINGERS
On October 6, 1871, a historic journey began as the Fisk Jubilee Singers embarked on their first national tour. Comprised of nine talented students from Fisk University, this remarkable a cappella group aimed to raise funds for their struggling institution. Little did they know that their efforts would not only secure their university’s future but also preserve and popularize traditional African American spirituals on a global scale.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers played a strong role in preserving the rich heritage of African American spirituals. These songs, rooted in the experiences of enslaved African Americans, held deep cultural and historical significance. By showcasing these spirituals to a wider audience, the Fisk Jubilee Singers ensured that this important musical tradition would not be lost to time. Beyond their cultural impact, the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ national tour held tremendous financial significance for Fisk University.
With the goal of raising $20,000, their efforts provided much-needed funds for the institution, which was dedicated to educating freed slaves after the Civil War. Through their talent and perseverance, the Singers secured the future of their university and paved the way for generations of African American students to come. Not only did the Fisk Jubilee Singers achieve remarkable success in their fundraising efforts, but their tour also put Nashville on the global music map. Their performances captivated audiences far and wide, and their encounter with the Queen of England solidified Nashville’s reputation as the “Music City.”
The Fisk Jubilee Singers were not merely performers; they were ambassadors of African American culture and music. Their groundbreaking around-the-world tour marked the first time a musical act traveled globally, showcasing African American spirituals to audiences in the United States and Europe. Through their performances, they shattered stereotypes and fostered a greater appreciation for Africa-American music and culture.
GOSPEL MUSIC
Spirituals are an essential component of gospel music, a form that unites many dimensions of spiritual practice, community, and history. There is no better example of spirituals in gospel music than Aretha Franklin performing “Amazing Grace” in 1970. Central to this performance is the participation of all involved – call and response from musicians and audience create a communal experience that one can take part in regardless of one’s religious background.
Duke Ellington composed spirituals in the 1940s, recording his most famous spiritual “Come Sunday” performed with Mahalia Jackson in 1958:
IV. GAME SONGS
African American musical roots can be heard in countless “game songs”, patting games, and jump rope rhymes we still learn as children, such as “The Name Game” recorded by Shirley Ellis in 1964.
This form of play started as an African tradition. As Lynde Rosario writes, one of the major characteristics of various African musical cultures is the use of hand clapping and foot stomping as accompaniment. Rituals of call and response, body percussion and dance melded together with the expressions and conventions of the European culture. These morphed over time to form the modern games of today. The oldest hand games recorded in Europe are Pat-A-Cake, dated in 1698, and Pease Porridge Hot, also dated in the 17th century. The custom peaked between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then receded until the 1960s when the practice became mainstream. The tradition of jumping rope became pervasive in the 20th century, the rope providing a rhythm perfectly suited for rhyme and song.
V. THEATER, MEDICINE SHOWS, AND MINSTRELSY
The period after the civil war saw the birth of America’s national entertainment industry in the form of theater circuits, music publishing, and minstrelsy. As Miller describes:
Minstrelsy emerged in the 1830s out of northern working-class immigrant theaters to become the most popular and profitable form of entertainment in the country by mid 19th century. It involved the performance of supposedly African-American song and dance by White actors under black face masks of burnt Cork. From the common use of dialect or malapropisms to represent black speech to the ubiquitous exaggerations of black physical deviations from white norms… minstrel shows depicted southern slaves happy in their bondage and free African-Americans unfit for citizenship…sadly longing for the safety security and interracial harmony of the old plantation. Minstrelsy did all this within the irreducible context of the black facemask – a prop that performed racial distance under the auspice of racial passing.
From Minstrelsy and the Construction of Race in America
Minstrelsy emerged in the early 1800’s as the first distinctly American form of popular culture. While its content served to entertain audiences, it also worked to provide a means with which common Americans could learn about and understand the events occurring in their large and constantly evolving country. One of the main topics of interest that minstrelsy took up was race. In his work Blacking Up, Robert Toll argues that the content of minstrel songs worked to reinforce the racial ideology of white superiority—a system where “whiteness” allowed for full citizenship rights to the American body politic, while “blackness” and “yellowness” implied inferiority and exclusion. A thorough examination of minstrel material from the second half of the 19th century, a period which witnessed rising levels of immigration into the U.S. as well as the demise of the formal system of second class citizenship for blacks (slavery), confirms Toll’s claim. The numerous ways in which both black Americans and Asian immigrants were portrayed as inferior to whites, within this material, clearly reveals minstrelsy’s attempts to confirm the ideology of white superiority.
It’s important to understand minstrelsy and the influence that this form of national entertainment would have on generations of African-Americans and how it still echoes in our entertainment today. Music was becoming a highly profitable commodity in the 19th century as well as an art – the commercial infrastructure in which African-American artists would need to navigate included this minstrel tradition, as well as the stereotypes and expectations it created in American audiences. This was accompanied by a rise in music publishing (coming out of New York) as well as theater companies that were influencing the country.
Many songs that come out of minstrel shows rooted in grotesque stereotypes are still sung by unsuspecting Americans today, as described by Dr. Katya Ermolaeva here.
Warning – offensive racial imagery:
The legacy of minstrelsy is pervasive in American entertainment. Stereotypes persist, as pointed out in Hari Kondabolu’s documentary “The Problem with Apu”. Here Kondabolu analyzes issues of representation, in part using the lenses of American minstrilsey an entertainment industry dominated by white creators and audiences.
SNAKE OIL
Another form of traveling entertainment set the tone for the modern age – the medicine show. The show, consisting of music, comedy, and drama was free – but you were subjected to pervasive advertisements for various cures and tonics, all for sale at the show. Most of these cures didn’t work, and the idea of “snake oil” came to mean a bogus product that didn’t deliver on its promise. This tradition lives in the pervasive commercials we are inundated with on television, radio, in movies, on trains, planes, etc.,
From NPR:
The 1800s saw thousands of Chinese workers arriving in the United States as indentured laborers to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. According to historian Richard White’s book Railroaded, about 180,000 Chinese immigrated to the United States between 1849 and 1882. The vast majority of the workers came from peasant families in southeastern China and were signed to contracts that ran up to five years for relatively low wages (compared with their white counterparts), wrote David Haward Bain in his book Empire Express.
Among the items the Chinese railroad workers brought with them to the States were various medicines — including snake oil. Made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation, snake oil in its original form really was effective, especially when used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The workers would rub the oil, used for centuries in China, on their joints after a long hard day at work. The story goes that the Chinese workers began sharing the oil with some American counterparts, who marveled at the effects.
So how did a legitimate medicine become a symbol of fraud? The origins of snake oil as a derogatory phrase trace back to the latter half of the 19th century, which saw a dramatic rise in the popularity of “patent medicines.” Often sold on the back pages of newspapers, these tonics promised to cure a wide variety of ailments including chronic pain, headaches, “female complaints” and kidney trouble. In time, all of these false “cures” began to be referred to as snake oil.
In this clip performer Furry Lewis describes a typical medicine show in the early 20th century:
VI. RAGTIME
Publishing was also one the first money makers in American music, and the purchasing of sheet music to be played at home on a piano proved to be the first in a long line of money-making opportunities for those in the growing national entertainment industry which would soon include recordings and radio.
Ragtime music came into existence long before it was given a name. By the end of the 1890s, the term defined a performance style and practices rooted in African American traditions and applied to composing and playing popular song, dance, and instrumental music. An abundance of sheet music testifies to the multi-fold existence of this genre during this period of ragtime’s widespread popularity from about 1896 to 1920.
Ragtime was created and popularized by itinerant African American musicians, many of whom did not read or write music. These musicians first developed ragtime as a playing style, disseminating this un-notated new music in brothels, saloons, bars, and other similar sites where African Americans found their first performing opportunities after the Civil War. The first audiences of ragtime, therefore, consisted of the player-composers themselves, the owners of the bars and brothels, the visitors (presumably affluent White men), and the prostitutes who worked there. Apart from these venues of low reputation, there were several other contexts within the contemporary entertainment business where ragtime was featured, such as vaudeville and the musical theater.
Most Americans became acquainted with ragtime only after it appeared as printed music, which is why many authors describe ragtime as “composed” music, with little emphasis on ragtime as a performance art. Usually a ragtime piece was published in small numbers and sold a few dozen (sometimes a hundred) copies in the area where it was published. However, “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899) was the exception to this rule.
The publication of “Maple Leaf Rag” and its tremendous success greatly increased composer Scott Joplin’s visibility and influence as well as that of publisher John Stark. When Stark initially published “Maple Leaf Rag,” Joplin received one penny per copy in royalties. By 1905, Stark was selling three thousand copies a month and “Maple Leaf Rag” had become the most popular and best-selling rag of all time. The incredible success of “Maple Leaf Rag”— a half-million copies were sold by 1909—inspired other music publishers to produce hundreds of rags.
Ragtime is the first major mass-marketed commercially successful music in the United States that featured the pervasive elements of African influence that would soon dominate popular music.
VII. BLUES
The lives of formerly enslaved African-Americans changed after the Civil War in important ways that affected the music. They involved the possibility of leisure time that could be used to make music unsupervised, new freedom to choose who to become romantically involved with (within the parameters set by Jim Crow segregation), and the possibility of travel which would eventually result in mass of migration of African-Americans away from the south throughout the 20th century. All of these elements are important in the creation of the blues, music created in the southeast United States notably the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans around the turn of the century. The blues was a music created by individuals, often with guitars or other stringed instruments. We will deal with this music in more depth in a future module, but for now consider some of the musical characteristics you can hear (and feel) in a performance such as “Dark was The Night Called was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson from 1927.
My own experience of this scene (and the entire series) caused me to give up any of my own feeble pursuits of what these images and sounds might “mean” within the context of history or this series. I though later that there seem to be two paths to choose from when thinking about much of Lynch’s work here, either 1) try to invent explanations the story which have no definitive resolution or meaning, or 2) give up the pursuit all together (if you can) and accept that you are along for the ride. The beauty of episode 8 is that choice has been made for you.
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