African‑American music, down through the centuries, has always been a product of a series of compromises and blendings between West African styles and West European forms. African polyrhythm, for example, is widely considered the most complex rhythm in the world: a singer, chorus, hand-clappers, bell players, and drummers typically produce seven to ten different rhythms at a time, in a way that makes sense to the musicians and their audience.
This African rhythmic universe is more complex than the “western” mind is accustomed to, and has therefore, by some logic, been called “primitive.” And yet, as musicologist Melville Herskovitz wrote in 1941, for a European
to master a simple South African piece on the marimba which requires the player to follow a 4/4 beat in the left hand, and a 9/4 in the right—with a rhythmic consonance every 36 beats, is well-nigh impossible.[i]
Such “primitivism” has never really sold big here in its original form. It has been transformed into a number of musical practices including syncopation, or off-the beat emphasis, originally called “mistakes” by the Euro-American music authorities. The echoes of polyrhythmic musicality are heard in Afro-Latin rhythms and in the blues, jazz, and everything that came after. One particular rhythm from Ghana, for example, has been traced through the samba and ragtime to the Charleston.[ii]
West African traditions place even stress on all beats, as opposed to only the “strong beats” (one and three, out of four). This approach was expressed by Africans in America not only as syncopation, but also as added stress on the formerly weak offbeat, which seems to shift the rhythm backwards while it’s moving forwards—hence the term “backbeat”—setting up a rocking motion in the music and the dancing.
The result is a blend of African rhythmic feeling with European musical forms. The backbeat is the Black beat: for the most obvious example, listen to an audience clapping to Country music,[1] then to audience response to any form of Black popular music. (It would be even simpler to listen to the clapping in White churches as opposed to Black ones, but we White folks don’t clap so much in our churches.) With the backbeat competing with the downbeat, it’s as if two different rhythms were coexisting—the closest you can come in 4/4 time to the West African concept. Robert Cantwell, in Bluegrass Breakdown, even supposes that
[T]he strong backbeat which suggests sexual thrusting is only the grossest and most violent of the many subtler kinds of erotic interplay between musician and music occasioned by the musician’s independence of the fundamental rhythm.[iii]
[1] Country music is capitalized, while blues is not,
solely to distinguish this specific music
from the countryside in general.
Which, if true, could help explain the fear and loathing, along with the fascination, that White America has always felt for Black American culture. But I jump ahead. What are these subtler kinds of interplay, erotic or otherwise? A.M. Jones, in Studies in African Music, writes that in the West African musical tradition,
The melody being additive, and the claps being divisive, when put together they result in a combination of rhythms whose inherent stresses are crossed. This is the very essence of African music: this is what the African is after. He wants to enjoy the conflict of rhythms.[iv]
This was manifestly un-European, but was not to remain un-American for long. If we think of music as being made up of units of time (the bar, with a duration of, for example, four beats), we can understand West African rhythmic sense as grouping the beats irregularly, while the underlying rhythm obtained from the Europeans’ musical forms would be regular, and quite simple. Here again we have the built-in conflict of rhythms. As John Work explains in American Negro Songs and Spirituals, in African-American music
…the rhythms may be divided roughly into two classes—rhythm based on the swinging of the head and body and rhythms based on the patting of hands and feet.[v]
Cantwell explains these two types of movement as
a reciprocal or back-and-forth motion and a continuous rolling, flowing, or driving—that is to say, “rock” and “roll,” whose interdependency reflects the conjunction of pulse and beat in the fundamental rhythm and is the heart of swing.[vi]
While a European musician will commonly play four beats in a measure while another player plays two, the concept of combining three and two confounded the western mind. Jones says of the Africans,
We have to grasp the fact that if from childhood you are brought up to regard beating 3 against 2 as being just as normal as beating in synchrony, then you develop a two-dimensional attitude to rhythm which we in the West do not share…To beat 3 against 2 is to them no different from beating on the first beat of each bar.[vii]
If you doubt the fundamental difference described here, consider the rhythmic complexity of Balkan music, and even more, Indian, and you will have the idea. Or consider the Afro-Brazilian tune set in 12-1/2 beats to the measure, or the African drummers who put an accent every 15 beats for some undoubtedly good reason.[viii]
The African-Americans’ rhythmic alterations to European-derived forms resulted partly from the banning of the African drum by the English, and later by the slave states of the U.S.[2] The intricacies of drumming were displaced into clapping, stamping, and vocals, and later into the way Blacks handled European instruments.
[2] The drum was perceived to transmit information in a “foreign language” –
some African spoken languages, like Chinese, achieve part of their meaning
through tonal variations. Drumming also gathered slaves in larger numbers than
the masters would like. (Conway 1995, 72, 322)
Another characteristic of West African music not shared by Europeans was an affinity for a variety of percussive textures; rasping and scraping sounds, for example, are considered musical in this tradition. In the diaspora, this led to the invention of countless percussion instruments, often modeled on African originals. These are to be heard in Brazil, home of more percussion than most of the rest of the world put together; in Caribbean-born salsa and other Afro-Latin genres; and in the vocal as well as instrumental styles of so many varieties of music from the U.S. This elevation of “non-refined” sounds to musical acceptance was and continues to be anathema to many who cultivate a more indoor sensibility. Some people think washboards are for washing. And some folks just can’t warm up to the banjo, often described as essentially a drum with strings.
We should take into account here something usually not accounted for: the early closeness of European and African working people in America. Many Whites, and some Blacks, were brought across the ocean as indentured servants. They were able to earn their freedom, until the construction of the legal edifice of slavery, which came later. So in the first period, up till the late seventeenth century, there was a much more fluid and collegial relationship between folks from different continents. As one French scholar put it, “From 1620 to 1660 or so people of different shades worked shoulder to shoulder, lived and occasionally revolted in concert.”[ix]
And undoubtedly sang in concert as well—work songs, at a minimum. Bear in mind that Europeans and Africans did not first meet in America. There was already cultural contact, sometimes directly, sometimes via Arab cultures, and much had been shared before crossing the Atlantic. Another writer informs us that in early Jamestown,
Negro and white servants seemed to be remarkably unconcerned about their visible differences. They toiled together in the fields, fraternized during leisure hours, and, in and out of wedlock, collaborated in siring numerous progeny.[x]
All this singing and siring was set to cease as the development of the North American colonies began to look like a profitable enterprise requiring a longer-term indenturing—to wit, slavery. Beginning in the 1660s, legal codes separated White and Black into those who could look forward to freedom and those who could not. This had partly to do with the relative inability of Blacks to run away and hide among the populace, and more to do with the growing trade in enslaved Africans. By 1700, Blacks had lost the right to read, to marry freely, to better their position. Racial harmony among the lower classes abated; indentured servants whitened.
[i]Herskovitz 1941, 20.
[ii]Schuller 1968, p 19-20.
[iii]Cantwell, 215.
[iv]A.M. Jones, 1959, vol 1, 21.
[v]John Work, American Negro Songs and Spirituals, New York:Bonanza Books, 1940, quoted in Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, 164.
[vi]Cantwell, 99.
[vii]Jones, 46, 102.
[viii]Stearns, 270.
[ix]Denis-Constant Martin, 28-29.
[x]Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, New York:Knopf 1956. Quoted in Rublowsky, 57.