Traces in the Blues: The Genre as a Creative Syncretism of African and European Sources

 

Part III 

 

The fodet genre of Senegambia discussed in the last part of this essay remains alive today and clearly displays the musical characteristics that make it intriguing to listen to in comparison with the blues of the early 20th century. Formally fodet pieces are cyclical like the blues’ common 12-bar repeating chord structure; melodically they emphasize two to four descending phrases arranged in a particular pattern – sometimes even AAB, thus directly analogous to the blues’ structure; most fodet pieces have one main tonal center (its key, if you will) that is played in for the larger part of the cycle and one other tonal center (usually a whole step away) that functions much like the V/dominant tonal center of the blues’ cycle last four bars;   and the melodic material emphasizes the fifth very strongly, just as in the blues. The instrument – xalam – is from the family of instruments known to be the basis of the banjo in the United States, interesting because the fiddle, banjo, tambourine trio was probably the most common in early US-American history. Finally, the social role of fodet players – keepers of history, social commentators, inter-group diplomats, and entertainers all rolled into one – bears striking similarity to that of later blues men. Given these parallels and the fact that an overwhelming number of slaves were shipped from Senegambia and the Guinea Coast in the 17th and 18th centuries together make a strong case for considering the fodet as a prominent musical tradition that affected the creation of the blues.

 

Common sense, however, is sometimes too common. While it makes sense that if we find similarities between two traditions and large numbers of people who came from one place and were transplanted to the other that this is the most likely route of transfer, we must ask whether it is actually the case. Gerhard Kubik, building upon the revolutionary insight of Paul Oliver, has challenged this doxa, arguing that it is perhaps not the number of people that matter but the fitness of the transfered material that matters most. For example the mouth-resonated musical bow played in white Appalachia almost definitely was a transfer from a similar tradition carried over by a small number of slave from Mozambique.

 

“People from southeastern Africa in the United States may have been few in number, but this would not necessarily inhibit their cultural influence. Here, as always, we have to bear in mind that culture is not necessarily transmitted in proportion to people’s numbers. One charismatic personality will suffice to release a chain reaction. One virtuoso musician can end up being imitated by hundreds. This fact has often been neglected by researchers proceeding from a collectivistic perception of culture. (Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues p. 13)

 

The argument is powerful, I find, especially if we look to other cultural practices where one person indeed has caused a tidal shift, such as Kenny Clarke’s revolution in jazz drumming or Charlie Parker’s on the saxophone, to name but two within the musical realm.   Indeed, in an environment as hostile as that of the US slave culture a solo tradition may have had the greatest chance of success.   Even if this may not be the rule, it occurs often enough to cast doubt upon any argument based upon numbers of transported culture bearers. Understanding that power is in this case not in numbers allowed both Oliver and Kubik to look beyond the coastal areas for musical traditions which might bear even greater similarity to the blues. What they found was surprising.

 

Africa is no different than other geographies in the sharp distinctions there are between coastal and interior regions. Coasts tend to be places of intense trade and intercourse with other regions, often have different climates and cuisines, and thus it is unsurprising to find the musical traditions in the west central Sudanic hinterland – that geographic area just interior to the West African coast – are similarly distinct. Without pointing to a particular song type or genre Kubik shows how the musical styles of this area contrast with those of the Mande traditions on the coast. In addition to solo singing traditions accompanied by various stringed instruments (lutes such as the xalam and garaya; one-stringed fiddles such as goge, goje, and riti) the area displays an absence of polyrhythms and so-called asymmetric time-line patterns. Time-line patterns are repeated rhythms used to orient the players and listeners within a ‘bar.’ In the West we use many symmetric rhythms, such as 1234, 1234 or 123, 123, 123, whereas a common Brazilian one is 12312312, 12312312. In the latter the division is not even, but asymmetric, and Kubik has noted during his more than four decades of research in Africa that where polyrhythms are prominent, so to are asymmetric time-lines. Thus the absence of both in the blues – which uses a 4-beat bar and a symmetric shuffle feel (123, 123, 123, 123) – points similarly to an African tradition lacking such musical features, such as the west central Sudanic belt we’re looking at here. Lastly, Kubik notes that the singing style of this area emphasizes a “raw” vocal timbre and heterophony (singing a melody over a chordal background) similar to the blues and distinct from the “sweeter” timbres and parallel harmony of the coastal regions. 

 

The interior not only has a different culture because of differences in trade, subsistence, and interaction, but also because of the historical inheritance from the Muslim influence. Islamic converts fled to Africa still during Mohammed’s lifetime, but it was from the 8th century on that various parts of Africa – especially here in the eastern sub-Saharan area – were Islamicized, bringing them new instruments, musical traits, and practices. Chief among them for our purposes are the declamatory vocal style (loud voice, good projection, addressing an audience), wavy intonation (heavy vibrato, moving a pitch slightly around), use of melismas (the florid vocal improvisation often associated with blues and gospel singers, many notes sung to one syllable of text often at the end of a phrase) and the widespread use of pentatonic scales (scales with five pitches to the octave, not seven as is common in the West). Together these stylistic traits suggest to Kubik that the blues retained tonal and rhythmic material from the ancient Nigritic song styles – those discussed in the foregoing paragraph – and ornamentation and performance aspects of the Islamic influences.

 

What both Kubik’s and Coolen’s theories lack is any direct evidence for particular movements of people to areas of the United States and the emergence of even a proto-blues style that would raise one probability above the other. But I think it clear that both provide us with a clearer picture of the sorts of musical traditions that may have led to the blues of the early 20th century. Tracing these traits is no mere academic exercise for it forces us not only to listen to the music more closely, but it allows us to hear history embedded – consciously or not – in the very fabric of the sound. Thus heard, the music is forcefully thrust back into the real world from which it came and which gave it its life. In the next part we will return from Africa and look at the probable conditions in the New World from which the blues arose. The picture drawn will, for many, be a surprising one.

Traces in the Blues: The Genre as a Creative Syncretism of African and European Sources

Part II

 

If the blues is the most visible (or audible) genre in which freed blacks created a post-Emancipation identity both for themselves and for the European descendants, then there is far more at stake in searching for its “roots” than mere academic exercise. These narratives of musical origins tell us specifics about the people who were variously forced (slaves and convicts), coerced (indentured servants), or gladly brought (colonists and religious exiles) to the New World and thus about the history of our nation and the conditions under which its early citizens lived. For music is not an isolated “art” reserved for entertainment and contemplation, as the modern cosmopolitan ethos would lead one to believe, but an activity in which real people negotiate, comment upon, reflect, and sometimes alter the realities around them. If its surfaces may seem abstract – notes and chords, poetic texts and swooping voices, dancing bodies and tapping feet – its reality is grounded the mundane and its story is of everyday life.

 

Searching for the origins of the blues allows us not only to investigate the musical materials which define the genre and, thus, hear the music more precisely, but also to trace the paths of those musical traits carried by individuals over the Hell of the Atlantic and transplanted in the New World. It provides a chance to learn and hear the further history of ourselves. Here in brief, then, are two major theories of the origins of the blues in Africa – one locating the site of greatest influence on the Guinea Coast in contemporary Senegambia and the other positing the dominance of the west central geographic Sudan, in the savannah hinterlands.

 

Michael Coolen (University of Oregon) has made a strong argument for the fodet genre played in Senegambia, based on his field research in the late 70s. He found a strong, active tradition of solo musicians/historians/storytellers called xalamakat after their string instrument the xalam in the area of west Africa that was the largest source for African slaves to the United States. This caste of musicians come from the Wolof ethnicity, but play songs both from and among the many other ethnicities that make up Senegal and Gambia. In this genre Coolen found – beyond the performance practice characteristics (single male musician, wandering from town to town, low social position, interpreter of history) – a number of musical structural similarities between the fodet and the blues. The pieces of this genre are cyclical, with 6 to 24 beats per phrase, then built into structures of two to four such phrases. This is not dissimilar to the standard blues with three lines of 16 beats each. In addition, the tonal center of the phrases sometimes moves away from the root of the main phrase, just as the third phrase of the blues moves to a tonal center a fourth or fifth above (moving, for instance, from a tonal center in D for the first two phrases to one in G or A for the last, before going back to the D tonality) Further, the melodies of fodet are primarily falling (start on a high note at the beginning of a phrase and fall to a lower one at the end) and emphasize the perfect fifth (whichever note is exactly 7 semitones above the root), also attributes common to the blues.

 

Finally, Coolen cites organological evidence (that is, evidence about instruments), which he finds particularly convincing in his comparison with the blues. Among the Wolof, ensembles consisting of the bowed-lute riti, the plucked-lute xalam, and a tapped calabash are common and bear striking similarity to the popular 19th century ensembles with fiddle, banjo, and tambourine in the United States. Although no lineage is claimed for the fiddle or the tambourine, Coolen draws an interesting picture of the xalam in comparison to the banjo. The body of the xalam is an oblong resonator carved out of a piece of hardwood, then covered with a stretched piece of cow’s hide. This skin is fastened either with small pegs or nails and a wooden fretless fingerboard is attached. The xalam has five strings, traditionally made of horse hair, which are attached to the finger board at different lengths and there is no standard tuning as several are used. The construction similarities, especially the specificities in string number, lengths, and tunings, in addition to the use of a similar “claw-hammer” playing technique, make the comparison between the xalam and the banjo striking; the fact that it was used in ensembles very similar to the banjo-violin-tambourine make up used so extensively in the US gives even more food for thought.

 

In the next part of this essay I’ll introduce the theories of Paul Oliver and Gerhard Kubik for the savannah hinterland origin of many blues traits, while also discussing a little of the causal theory that must be considered when trying to determine which genre in Africa most likely had the greatest influence on the blues. Does it make sense, as Coolen thinks, to find the genre most similar and with the largest number of slaves, or could musical attributes brought over by just a few very charismatic individuals have found more fertile ground for other reasons in the New World?

Traces in the Blues: The Genre as a Creative Syncretism of African and European Sources

Part I

 

This much is clear: the blues is a musical genre that arose in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. It is an American music which was in large part a creative response to the identity vacuum left in the black community after the end of the Civil War and Emancipation. Whereas the role of black folk in America was laid out very explicitly – if often violently – during slavery, the forced dismantling of those social institutions was not accompanied by new structures. As the monied class sought to maintain control of its property and social standing, the European lower classes – a very substantial section of the population – found itself in competition with the newly freed slaves for the resources at the bottom of society. This scramble for position was not isolated to the economic realm however. The identity of the freed slaves was now also open to interpretation from all corners of the society. In the legal realm the Black Laws sought to define as inferior to those not of European descent, and minstrelsy and vaudeville shows, with their lively (and hugely popular) combination of song and dance, often performed by whites in blackface, portrayed a stereotype of blacks as unintelligent, uncosmopolitan, childlike, and laughable which was clearly advantageous for the white lower class to propagate. But, as was the case during slavery as well, these attacks were not taken lying down.

 

More that any other artistic genre, the blues can be heard to respond to this war for identity. If we examine many aspects of the blues, both as a genre and as a musical practice, we find attributes which can easily be interpreted as a reaction against the dominant culture’s attempts to force the blacks into a subserviant corner, primarily by refusing to play the same game. The most obvious place to begin is with the texts. Their content can be largely divided into two themes: the laudable outlaw, who refuses to live in society or by its rules, but nonetheless (or, therefore) deserves our respect, and the liberating power of being down and out – a sort of modern day Job. Both of these themes propose a method of dealing with the lot dealt blacks after Emancipation, albeit in different ways. If you can’t find a place in a society that doesn’t want you, then leave – live on its borders; or find a spiritual method of transcendence that allows you to turn those abuses of society into your own advantage. And these forms of compensation and identity creation are not limited to the music, but are also mirrored in the musical practice of the early blues. The stereotype of the lone, male wandering blues man is corroborated by what evidence we have. Blind Lemon Jefferson, for example, has said that he travelled from town to town, show to show with little other than his instrument, following the trains and the money. Similar accounts are told by Robert Johnson and bluesmen before them. Thus these men not only sang about outlaws, they themselves chose to live on the edges of society – with no home, no steady job, no family – in effect rejecting the categories of society and positing the benefits of life beyond.

 

If this is the true import of the blues, not just a catchy musical genre, but a field on which the social position of blacks in a new America was fought, then it is little wonder that people want to find its sources. As a matter of course, the origins of the blues are most often sought in Africa, because – the reasoning goes – if the blues is an African American genre, and the African American ancestors came from Africa, then it only makes sense to look there. And that, indeed, has been the course of research. A majority of the slaves brought to the United States were most likely from parts of west Africa and it is musics from this region that the blues most closely resemble. In the next part of this essay I will examine a few of the most plausible and well-researched theories of the blues’ origins in Africa, looking at musical specifics and not the vague generalizations of the pop media. Only then will I be able to turn to the United States itself and the class-based (and not race-based) organization of the pre-Civil War society to make the case for the blues as a syncretic genre in which lower-class musicians – from both Europe and Africa – reacted to their plight and sought musical similarities to create a new American art form.