I would like to start with a little anecdote that a French blues aficionado, Rene Malines told me, quoting Eric Bibb at a press conference some ten years ago in France, during a “Cognac Blues Passions”-festival. Eric Bibb had heard an album produced by Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré (whose music is regarded as representing a mix of the traditional Malian music and the blues) and thought : “This is it! This is the proof! The blues came from Africa!” and decided he wanted to record with Touré too. So he payed him a visit in Mali and told the African musician about that enlightning he had. Touré smiled, maybe he laughed too, and he showed Bibb his record collection, filled with blues records, including a lot of John Lee Hooker albums.” A similar story is told by Samuel Charters in his contribution to Cohn’s sublime publication “Nothing but the blues” (1993), when he narrates about Touré whose friend from his village gave him an album from John Lee Hooker. He trusted his friend that the album had greatly influenced him when he started singing…
These stories caution us to be very careful when tracing the roots of the blues to the (sole) African culture. It can be very challenging (and exotic) to draw parallels between the blues singer and the African ‘griots’: the masters of word and music, or the ‘keepers of history’ as Joanna Lott has called them. There is without any doubt a real intellectual and musical pleasure in the search for melodic resemblances between (early) blues and the traditional songs of the ‘griots’. A similar exercise has by the way been made with regard to the supposed roots of blues in Muslim chants (J. Curiel). But, at the end of the day, what does that tell us, what does it add to our knowledge? The sources on which we have to rely are very often too weak (and doubtful) to come to anything more than pure speculation.
Of course, the “lean, loose-jointed Negro” who W.C. Handy heard playing in the Tutwiler station in 1903 had not been inspired by the African ‘griots’. He was influenced by what he had heard from his family, friends and neighbours, who at their turn had been formed by some two centuries of cultural development on the North American continent. From the very first day that Africans were deported to America and set foot on the plantations, an acculturation process had started in a society which was multiracial/multi-ethnic. When we want to understand the blues, it makes thus more sense to narrow our historical horizon to this acculturation process, rather than to focus on the germs in the African culture. For those who are sceptic about the impact of the white culture during this acculturation process, let me entrust you to another amusing quote. In his paper “”Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs”, Brown cites a slave singing a Negro Folk song which includes the line : “In London town where I was born”, a line which he traced back to an old Scotch English ballad…
But let us be more serious now. In what follows, I would like to make a parallel between certain characteristics of the blues and a number of formal traits of the slave songs on the American soil and which have been well documented. This parallelism does not ‘explain’ the blues in any way; it only indicates a genetic alliance; it demonstrates that the DNA of ancient slave songs and the blues share some genes.
The blues song is a song which comes to live during its performance. Both in its generic concept as in its individual presentation, it lends its meaning from and to the context in which it is put forth and played. It displays a forceful power of creative energy through its on the spot improvisation, much like Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, which builds and extends upon only a few chords (1). To this end, the blues artist has at his disposal a vast body of tunes and lyrics which he can use and adapt to the particular context in which he performs. Komara (2005) names a number of techniques (call them: skills) on the textual and melodic level which the blues artist deploys. On the level of the wording for instance, he defines a.o. the “borrowing of phrases” (catchphrases or formulas which are frequently used over different songs by one or more artists), “the paraphrasing” (restatement of conceptual subjects with different words), “the appropriation” (transfer of complete choruses from one song to another..) and “telescoping” (adding or suppressing of words of an existing phrase). The changing content of blues classics as for instance ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ forms an example of another technique whereby the “locale is changed” to produce a new song (see my earlier article : “Kokola Blues : From Baltimore to Sweet Home Chicago”).
“By means of such techniques, a vast body of lyrics can be generated, and lyrics may be chosen at any moment by the blues singer to suit a particular setting or occasion. The more lyrics a singer knows, the more valued he or she may be to their audience and cultural group” (Komara, p. 107). Personally, this is also what continues to amaze me about the blues and which makes me admire it profoundly: each artist gives his very own expression, each time again and again, of his/her and the group’s emotion using a given set of lyrical and tonal instruments to produce a new musical play. If that is not art in his purest and most creative form! No two songs sound alike even if they draw from the same lyrical and melodic source.
Based on a careful analysis of a broad range of documents, White and White (2005) unearth evidence that similar techniques were already engaged in the antebellum slavery period by the African American population. Keywords that typify their sonic techniques were : mixing, adding, improvisation and spontaneity. Songs were created in a spontaneous way, mixing different elements from both the sacral and secular realm to express emotions in reaction to the immediate and daily circumstances of life. The improvisation was done on the spot; the song could commence with some lyrics which were familiar, with a number of lines which were ready-manufactured, but words and lines were added as the song went on, inspired by the emotion of the moment. The dynamical singing testified of a huge creativity : an existing song served as nothing but a frame which was filled in the “hic and nunc”- context in which it was performed. As each context and moment were different, no two songs were ever the same. There existed what White and White called a free floating stock of lines, couplets and stanzas which could be combined by the needs of the moment. Sometimes only words were dropped or added, sometimes whole lines or phrases or choruses were replaced.
This ‘patching’ happened not only on the lyrical level but was also applied to the tunes. They were freely embellished, and tempos were changed according to the contextual frame, often to an extent that the original tune was hardly recognizable. This created a large scope for improvisation and personal expression.
The lyrical ‘patching’ created amazing mosaics which were based on the combination of existing formulaic expressions that were transported from one song to another. Central in this technique was the association between images displayed in one song which were carried over to another song, performed in another context. One image evoked connotations to other images and were combined to make a new sonic entity which fitted the actual context. This mode is typical for an oral society where no pre-written scripts of songs exist but where the sound is born out of the immediate needs and feelings. Improvisation requires that both the performer and the audience (which at the end constitute a single “body”) also are allowed to pause; hence the repetitions that are common in this style: they create the possibility to digest the words and emotions already evoked and at the same time create the necessary space for the emergence of new words and emotions.
This leads to a non-linearity in the performances which is very different from the European idiom which has accustomed us to linearly developed melodies and lyrical structures. It explains also why the white observers of the early slave sounds and their later spirituals often expressed their incomprehension, though they might at the same time have been impressed with the emotional power that radiated from them. What those early observers failed to notice is that not the individual words and phrases as such were important, but rather the emotion that was moulded and the images which were constructed. As Michael Taft has observed correctly, the potential for emotion is increased when phrases out of one context are inserted into another song: one creates a cocktail of lyrics and stanzas which each on their own can carry associations to strong images. The simple use of a phrase coming from another song also imports along with it the emotions that are attached to this phrase (2). The art was in the skillful joining of words and phrases to provide for the emotional release of the moment. A formula “therefore gains meaning and significance beyond its immediate semantic components” (White and White, p. 136). 
The sources for the combinations of images, phrases and words could be plentiful and of different nature. Biblical texts and sacral imagery could be combined with fragments of the daily life, even with references to modern inventions, as is shown in a spiritual which is quoted in Sterling Brown’s 1953 essay on “Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs amongst the African American population” :
“Jus’ call up Central in Heaven,
tell Jesus to come to the phone”,
If the outline of song was at the start of the performance a mere framework which needed to be filled up, what was essential was that the filling up was done in a communal setting. Its construction was a co-construction : songs were the result of interactive events, a result of an unfolding conversation which was impossible to script in advance. Images and recalled impressions were mixed together in a group dialogue giving shape to a whole that was not an orderly arrangement of events and ideas but before all “a field of meaning”. It was the way that the African American in (t)his sonic space made sense of his world.
He perceived this world as a unity, with no clear line of demarcation between the sacral and the secular. In his songs elements of both secular and sacral nature were freely mixed to evoke the meaning of the moment. What was crucial was to keep the beat and the emotion as an expression of the unity of work, worship, leisure and play. There was an indifference to the supposed sacred-secular divide. A song could begin as a spiritual but along the way elements of the daily life and work condition could be mixed without a problem.
It would be interesting to follow the evolution of the split that occurred between the sacred and secular dimension of the African American culture along the lines dictated by the substitution of their religious belief systems by Christianity. By the time that it spread the blues was more and more considered as the devil’s music; the unity that existed in the antebellum period had made place for divided cultural spaces of sacred and secular nature between which it was often (though not always) difficult to commute. This topic however deserves more attention in perhaps a later article.
The combining of elements also crossed the colour line and was not limited to lyrics and tunes, but included also techniques. The lining out – a form of a cappella hymn-singing in which a leader gives each line of a hymn tune as it is to be sung, usually in a chanted form giving or suggesting the tune – provides us with a striking example. This technique was introduced by the whites (it has been first documented in England in 1644 for congregations with an insufficient number of literate members) and was adopted by the African American slave population as it reverberated their call-and-response style of singing. It was however not adopted and transposed as such. “In black hands, (), lining out often changed its character, becoming not so much a device for helping those who lacked the ability or opportunity to read, as part of the hymn itself, the lined-out “calls” having melodic and structural characteristics of their own. The typical slow tempo of lined-out hymns threw the improvisational and richly ornamental styles of black singers into sharp relief” (White & White, p. 63).
On the sideways, it is interesting to note that the lining out style of singing not only shows a Gaelic-African American link, but that recently it has been shown by jazz musician and Yale University music scholar Willie Ruff, that native Indians of the Oklahoma tribe practice(d) it. (3) I find it no less than thrilling to observe how people of such different origins can gather around the same musical table.
I have concluded from reading White & White’s study of documents on the Sounds of Slavery that much of what they said is readily applicable to the (early) blues. In this, I adhere to the observations from the American folklorist and anthropologist Roger Abrahams who finds a remarkable continuum from the great African bardic traditions through work songs to the present. He refers to Houston Baker, an American scholar specializing in African American literature, quoting him : “Like a streamlined athlete’s awesomely dazzling explosions of prowess, the blues erupts, creating a playful festival of meanings. Rather than a rigidly personalized form, (the songs) offer a nonlinear, freely associative, non-sequential meditation”. There is to the early slave songs and to the blues a striking circular character also: there is no determinate beginning and ending to the song. As White & White say : “songs continue until the performers have finished”. The blues singer does not want to give a (linear) account of an event, he wants to express and share an emotion, evoke a meaning rather than convey a pre-ordered set of feelings or events. His song continues until he feels that he has accomplished in giving a sense of his experience and emotion.
Can you thus feel the frustration that the early blues performers must have felt when they entered those first studios where after 3 minutes recording a red lamp signaled relentlessly the end of the waxing!? When John Hurt recorded his Stack-o-Lees blues in 1928, he had to stop at 2:57; luckily he was able to express more amply his feelings about this hero-bandit some forty years later when we could enjoy his immortal version for almost six minutes…
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FOOTNOTES
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(1) If you listen carefully, you will by the way hear some very bluesy parts in this masterpiece in musical (piano) history (but that is just a remark I give you as a sideways reflection).
(2) cited in White & White, p. 136
(3) My acknowledgements go to Michael Hawkeye Herman for drawing my attention to this finding (see also : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/20/AR2007042001918.html
and the Second Conference and Concert of Line-Singing at Yale, April 19, 2007.
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SOURCES
_____________________________________________
http://blindman.15.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=41943&hl=farka%20tour&st=15
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0205/keepers.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lining_out
Sterling Brown, “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs”, 1953
Shane White & Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery, 2005
Jonathan Curiel, Al’ America, Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots, 2009
This is a discussion which has been revisited many times.
Scots music is full of “blue notes” flattened 5th.s, 7th.s and 9th.s
and also uses the same scale as most blues music.
“Dirge singing” with “blue notes” go listen to a few pibrochs for that.
Regarding the Gaelic-African American link there are numerous instances
of Gaelic being the language spoken by slave communities, there are more
than one African American congregation who still sing in Gaelic.
There’s the numerous African Americans living in Canada having fled from
slavery in the US who spoke only Gaelic, take the story of the Maxwell brothers
for example.
This is a discussion which has taken place many times before and will no doubt
take place many times again.
Blindman
My viewpoint is somewhere in the middle. I don’t agree that African music had little or no influence on the blues. It had a huge impact. But I also disagree that European music had little influence on the blues and that it’s only marginal. Blues simply wouldn’t exist without the contribution of white music, just as Bluegrass wouldn’t exist without the contribution of black music.
As for the article, I think it minimizes the African influence too much and puts an over emphasis on the white roots of the blues.
Erwin is correct when he says whites introduced lined out hymn singing and that African Americans adapted it from white practice. This is actually well documented and proven fact. However, the black American genre of lined out hymns, owes about as much to African music as it does white lining out. Blacks adapted this hymn style from the whites, but heavily infused it with similar music from their African culture. Eventually this hymn genre would absorb other influences (eg. the practice of singing lined out hymns in the rhythmic style of ring shouts).
Their lined out hymns use the same “ballad meter”, the same hymn text, and the same alternating patterns of short and long lines of the white tradition (most often by speaking or singing the first line more quickly, than repeating the same lyric in a longer or long drawn out way). Additional to this, the term “long meter” is used for the slower drawn out variety of black lined hymns, a term also used for white lined hymns . The connection to white lined hymns is quite clear. On the other hand, other features in the genre such as overlapping vocal parts, and stylistic similarities to African dirge singing (sung slowly with the use of “blue notes”) suggest a strong African infusion. It is clearly a hybrid musical form, a hybrid style that was a major influence on the blues and certain pre-blues styles (the slower “moaning” type of spiritual singing, blues ballads, chanted sermons, prayer moans, etc).
I don’t personally believe there is a strong Gaelic-African American link with the lined out style of singing (as suggested by the article). This is a view traceable to the theories of Willie Ruff, which don’t hold a lot of water. Ruff ignores the non-Gaelic/ English language tradition of lined out hymns that were sung in both England and Lowland Scotland. It was the English language tradition of lined out hymn singing that clearly influenced the black hymn lining, not so much the Gaelic tradition (if it had any impact at all). The evidence is not particularly strong in the Gaelic direction. Lined out hymn singing wasn’t even exclusively British in origin, as it can also be found amongst the Amish from a German language tradition (it’s pretty doubtful the Amish hymn singing had any important impact on the slaves).
Lastly, on Native Americans, there is actual evidence (though perhaps not airtight proof) of Native influence on some African American religious music. Mark Knowles in his book “Tap Roots” (The early History of Tap Dancing) gives good evidence of Native influences creeping into the ring shout. I myself sometimes hear what reminds me of Native Indian music when hearing blacks sing their lined hymns, but I’ve traditionally been cautious of attributing it to Native influence (aware that certain features in Native music, can also be found in African and British song). But there is one black hymn performance, that sounds especially like Native Indian music to me. I refer to the song “O May I worthy Prove To See” as performed by the Shiloh Primitive Baptist Association from Elkin, North Carolina. Their rendition of this hymn is an example of shouting style lining out (more upbeat and lacking the drawn out tones), displaying ties to the ring shout. It sounds similar enough to Native Indian music (at least to my ears), that I’m strongly inclined to say their some real Native element at work.
There are some people who exaggerate the influence (or possible influence) of Native Indian music on black music, but it appears to have had at least a little bit of impact.
An opinion: I am not much impressed the article was useless for me
The first paragraph is finished and sure this is true that Farka music is not example of early Blues, its a mix of Blues and African music. Good, I thought, the writer wants to warn us to be careful that the musical heritage of one continent is not necessarily the same of another, even if it might look like to someone. With that on mind, I was expecting the writer not to fall for the trap of the so called “European roots of Blues” in several versions, like “Scottish Roots of Rap” , or in this article last paragraph “This technique was introduced by the whites” without proof that should be supplied, first that really the whites invented that, second that it is the very same technique of the slave music he is talking about, and that this technique is the essence of both styles but no proof was supplied.
1. It makes me wonder what makes one think it is legitimate that European when migrated to other places took their heritage, culture and arts with them, but the Africans when migrated were always coming up empty, no culture.
2. Its a learning disability which I think should be attributed to Romantic Music affecting the ears of the listener spoiling it, not to understand the real esthetics of Blues music is not in chord changes written in CMT style. Romantic CMT ears miss all the beauty in Blues.
In between the above mentioned paragraphs was some interesting lines but I couldn’t see any proof, more assuming this and that.
To each his own I didn’t like the article and felt somewhat annoyed, I also don’t subscribe to the “European Roots of Blues” school. I think those roots are marginal at best, should be mentioned as there are some, but everything is turned upside down on fantasy articles I saw on the forum, not just this writer but several others.
The first record I can find of African slaves in America
states that they were sold into Virginia, surely that’s
tobacco country?
These slaves were sold in 1619, the first Scottish slaves
were sold in 1627 and these mostly into tobacco country too.
There’s no reason to believe that the African and Scottish slaves
were segregated by plantation owners, so there’s the ground prepared
for the first seeds of culture interchange between the Scots and Africans.
Blindman
I’m assuming you mean the “Slave” music that was performed prior to the 20th century. Of course we all know Willie Dixon’s contributons to notation of blues music.
But in my opinion, the lack of formal notation is one thing that makes blues music so special. It could be performed by multiple musicians but each one would be the individual’s intrepretation and emotions. Death Letter Blues is one that comes to mind, having been performed by multiple musicians and each had it’s own personality.
I read Erwin’s article once and must admit, I want to re-read. It is excellent and I believe the connection between the slaves and the blues needs to be explored in more depth. The one thing I don’t remember coming out in Erwin’s article though is the relationship of the “church” to the actual music. I believe it has been established that the church contributed heavily to the addition of melodiies to the field hollers and chants of the slaves.
Just one point you must consider into the picture is the fact that European Music has been notated for several centuries while in the slave songs/spirituals/early Blues era the performance wasn’t notated , there were some attempts at notating these style with CMT notation systems since the mid 19th century, but unfortunately it failed to capture the essence of that culture.
Whenever there is no notation of musical style it means there is no search for linearity. European music was in the same situation before they had a notation system dedicated solely to their music. Unfortunately we still don’t have a good system for old Blues music, probably we will never have, however, attempts at notating Blues music with CMT notations gave us … modern Jazz music!
Interesting work. I like the part about repeated lines as useful “place holders”; reminds me of the repeated imagery in Homer (“rosy dawn”). One interesting classic resource would be Eric Auerbach’s [I]Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.” Auerbach looks at contrasts representation in the Bible and Homer through a historicist lens, meaning he looks at how the contemporary social structure influenced how the writer wrote. Might be a good critical model to follow in seeing how the antebellum environment produced affected the production of pre-blues and blues forms?
Some part, (I read it awhile back), seemed to imply that slavery started in cotton country. I would guess that other areas would have different musical influence and instrument training, which would have been “sold down river” also. The escalated value of slaves prevented freeing of many east coast slaves, when the south built cotton plantations. These were migrant workers and employers. Enjoyed reading it though.
GWba
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Posted by Duck Baker through Facebook :
“Duck Baker : () the one thing I’d really suggest is losing the specific reference to Jarrett. If you must make such a comparison, it can be done without trying to make such a precise comparison to a recording that represents a style of improvisation that has many basic differences that are more apparent than the very general similarity you name.”