MUS 112: African-American Traditions in American Music

What is the history of African American music?

Throughout the course of North American history, black musicians have drawn from their African heritage and borrowed from outside sources to create a variety of musical genres that have generated interest from multiracial audiences, weakening interracial barriers. Along the way music has served to both perpetuate and dispel negative or simplistic stereotypes of African Americans.

The history of African American music illustrates an ongoing cultural interaction between African Americans and European Americans from the colonial period through the twentieth century. Through a constant exchange of material, styles, and instrumentation, black and white Americans forged a pluralistic and distinctly American musical culture that survived despite a prevailing institutional racism that discouraged cultural interaction. The advent of mass media in the twentieth century resulted in a general breakdown of social, cultural, and regional barriers that exposed diverse audiences to black musical styles, catapulting African American music into the cultural mainstream.

Africans transported to North America as slaves brought with them a rich musical heritage that included professional and common folk stylings. From the beginning, slaves from various tribal and linguistic backgrounds relied on music as a vehicle for communication and expression and as a means of coping with the physical discomfort and psychological despair of bondage. Distinctively African musical traits such as blue notes and call-and-response patterns persevered in the music of plantation slaves. The scarcity of African instruments on Southern plantations encouraged the development of a cappella vocal music exemplified by the field song and the spiritual, which developed as increasing numbers of slaves became Christians. Both field songs and spirituals used rich imagery and emotional intensity to impart themes of joy, suffering, and longing, often employing double meanings and subtle metaphors as a means of “signifying” the Africans’ true desires and poking fun at their white masters. Slave music often contained hidden social connotations; the cakewalk, an elaborate slave pageant with musical accompaniment held during plantation holiday celebrations, clandestinely ridiculed white mannerisms to the bemusement of both blacks and unwitting whites.

By the 1820s, white entertainers were performing parodies of slave songs and dances for white American audiences. Blackening their faces with burnt cork and affecting exaggerated “darky” behavior, these performers laid the foundation for the minstrel show, which peaked in popularity just before the Civil War (1861–1865). The minstrel show exposed white audiences to a diluted form of African American music and produced lasting works by composers such as Daniel Decatur Emmett (author of “Dixie”) and Stephen Foster. Nevertheless, the vitality and poignancy of the best minstrel compositions were eclipsed by the negative images of childish, shiftless blacks that defined minstrelsy. The blackface minstrel show declined in popularity following the Civil War as the minstrel style became increasingly associated with black performers seeking to enter show business; as late as the 1920s, many black performers still called themselves minstrels.

Following the Civil War, black musicians made inroads into American popular culture, aided by increased attention from patrons of high art and the migration of black musicians into new geographical regions. Northern missionaries traveling south to minister to freed blacks sparked white interest in African American spirituals through publication in 1867 of a collection entitled Slave Songs of the United States and the organization of the Fisk Jubilee Chorus, a group of nine black youths who in 1871 embarked on a seven-year tour of the United States and Europe that would raise $150,000 to found Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Jubilee chorus was widely imitated throughout the South as black and white educators sought to raise money for black schools, establishing the place of spirituals in the American mainstream and further eclipsing the minstrel show as a cultural phenomenon.

The popularization of African American vocal music through spirituals coincided with the development of various styles of black instrumental music, the most influential of which was ragtime, a multiethnic mixture of folk stylings that rose to popularity in the 1890s. Although conceived by African Americans, ragtime was from its inception a multiethnic art form influenced by black interaction with urban immigrants. Early manifestations of ragtime combined modified Latin rhythms with a European march cadence. Black musicians, with a few notable exceptions such as Scott Joplin, dissociated themselves with ragtime before the turn of the century; nevertheless, ragtime continued to be associated with African Americans, partly because of the readiness of white music publishers and promoters to exploit popular interest in black American culture. By the time Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” was published in 1899, popular white composers were exploiting the ragtime style, and more often the name, for commercial gain. This trend culminated in the production of “coon songs” written by Broadway and Tin Pan Alley composers in a ragtime style with humorous lyrics about “negro life” that perpetuated the mythical stereotype of blacks as carefree, childlike, and rhythmic.

Jazz and Blues

In the late nineteenth century, as ragtime and spirituals defined high black culture and cultivated white audiences, new strains of music reflecting various degrees of African influence developed in the South. Emancipation of slaves after the Civil War created a new mobility among black musicians, who traveled throughout the United States playing in saloons, brothels, juke joints, medicine shows, and minstrel shows, often to white or mixed audiences. From this polyglot of styles emerged two distinct genres that would shape popular music through the twentieth century: jazz and blues. Blues, which flourished in areas with a high black population density such as the Mississippi Delta, set the field song to musical accompaniment by incorporating European and Hawaiian influences into a distinctly African musical framework. Jazz, rooted in cosmopolitan New Orleans, resembled ragtime in its multiethnic nature and its emphasis on the African musical devices of syncopation, polyrhythm, and call-and-response.

The Rise of “Race” Music

The commercialization of American music through radio and records in the 1920s exposed black and white audiences to a wide range of African-influenced musical styles, and promoters and performers of this music often sought to enhance their appeal by embracing racial stereotypes. Record companies marketed various black folk styles under the category of “race” music, and radio stations catering to black audiences (but attracting white ones as well) proliferated throughout the South and in urban areas in the North. Black migration to northern cities skyrocketed during World War II, resulting in a mixing of musical styles in urban ghettoes that produced a diverse body of music ranging from the gospel of Mahalia Jackson to the electric blues of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

The Commercial Era

The United States’ ongoing obsession with jazz through World War II nurtured an ongoing white fascination with African American culture. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, black rhythm and blues enjoyed increasing popularity among white teenagers economically empowered by postwar prosperity. Less cerebral than bebop jazz and less “ethnic” than electric blues, this hybridized, dance-oriented music provided a sound track for the emerging youth culture of mobility and independence. From this culture emerged rock and roll, a culmination of generations of exchange between black and white southern folk music. The arrival of rock and roll in the American mainstream both symbolized and influenced the changing course of race relations in the United States of the 1950s: Many popular early rock-and-roll performers were African American, and white rockabilly artists such as Elvis Presley openly affected black speech and mannerisms. Early rock-and-roll package tours were interracial and played to interracial audiences. White middle-class objections to the racial liberalism and subtle sexuality of rock and roll created a backlash against the music in the late 1950s that coincided with a white backlash against school desegregation. Yet rock and roll had already broken down barriers that had been weakening for generations.

The explosion of rock and roll in the 1960s catapulted African American music and artists into the mainstream of American culture. By mid-decade, Quincy Jones had become the first African American record label executive, and the distinctive sound of a black-owned record label, Motown, permeated the airwaves of AM radio. The atmosphere of experimentation that defined late-1960s popular culture encouraged a multicultural creative environment in which various styles clashed and merged and interracial groups such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly and the Family Stone, and Santana symbolized the openness and youth-oriented solidarity of the counterculture. The experimental mind-set of the 1960s combined with a new black consciousness brought new black musical genres to prominence in the 1970s, from rock-influenced fusion and funk to Afro-Caribbean styles such as dub (a precursor of rap), ska, and reggae, a mixture of calypso and New Orleans rhythm and blues that evoked millennialist religion and black separatism in its lyrics. Meanwhile, the mainstream of black music was dominated by vocal rhythm and blues, which retained much of its early style while incorporating contemporary musical and social themes. From the lighter side of funk and rhythm and blues emerged disco, a predominantly white cultural phenomenon that nevertheless reflected the social diversity of the urban club scene, garnering special appeal among Latino and gay American communities.

Late Twentieth Century

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, African American music continued to demonstrate an eclecticism and image consciousness reflected in its history and exacerbated by the ever-increasing power of mass media. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed greater financial and creative empowerment of blacks in the American music industry, as music videos brought increased exposure for African American music and artists. Nevertheless, the marketing of black music retained its historical penchant for stereotyping: Despite the professed realism of hardcore rap, its images of violence and misogyny exploited white apprehension of and fascination with inner-city blacks; the enormous popularity of hip-hop—itself a multiplicity of styles—encouraged commercial stereotyping that at times echoed past images of carefree, rhythmic black people.

The history of African American music is one of increased popular acceptance and exposure accompanied by a decreased sense of identity. Black musical expression, once regarded as an exotic but exploitable raw material, gradually became yet another entry in the diverse lexicon of American music. Black music in the late twentieth century reflected the general eclecticism of the age as well as the obsession with formulas characteristic of the popular music industry; nevertheless, it remained significant as both a reflection and a determinant of American popular culture (Text from EBSCO, 2023).