Minstrel shows were the first form of public entertainment in the nation’s history in which White folks procured their culture from Blacks, via imitators. But this show biz milestone came in the wake of a long private practice of something similar that was played out at or near home by White southerners. There are reports from the eighteenth century of Whites dancing in the style of the Africans, such as this one from The Virginia Gazette in 1753, reporting on a Richmond dance featuring two enslaved musicians playing for the rich and powerful revelers:
To the music of Gilliat’s fiddle and Brigg’s flute, all sorts of capers were cut…sometimes a Congo was danced and then the music grew fast and furious when a jig climaxed the evening.[i]
This could be our first report of what Alan Lomax later called “the hot Negro square-dance fiddle.” [ii] A private tutor’s journal entry in 1774 tells of two young White men attending an African-American party:
This Evening the Negroes collected themselves…& began to play the Fiddle, & dance…Ben & Harry were of the company—Harry was dancing with his Coat off—I dispersed them however immediately.[iii]
And consider this travel report from Virginia, published in Dublin in 1776:
Towards the close of an evening, when the company are pretty well tired with country-dances, it is usual to dance jigs; a practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from the Negroes.[iv]
This over-simplification obscures the constant interplay between Black and White dance styles. Two examples of the complexity: when Black musicians played for White plantation dances their music probably oscillated towards something the planter families were comfortable with, influencing their playing style—not to mention the choice of instruments—while subtly infusing among the Whites an appreciation for Black musical styles. And the fact that planters’ children danced with the workforce after their work hours meant that these kids imbibed the Africans’ styles and sentiments early on. This long and intricate and ongoing process should remind us of H.L. Mencken’s dictum: For every problem, there’s an answer that’s simple, plausible, and wrong.
Thomas Jefferson had, as we know, some intercourse with Black society. He even wrote a description of the banjo and its playing style. And his brother Randolph was described by Isaac, a Jefferson family captive worker, as “a mighty simple man: used to come out among Black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”[v] Whites danced to Black banjo music in Virginia and North Carolina from the late 1700s, a peak period of the slave trade. Imagine, the Africanization of White America didn’t have to wait for Elvis. Consider this report of a White folks’ ball in Virginia, 1755:
Betwixt the Country dances they have what I call everlasting jigs. A couple gets up and begins to dance a jig (to some Negro tune) others comes and cuts them out, and these dances always last as long as the Fiddler can play…[it] looks more like a Bacchanalian dance than one in a polite assembly.”[vi]
We don’t know the age of the dancers, but it certainly sounds like latter-day generational culture wars—jazz, Elvis, rap—“they call that dancing?!” On the other hand, whites had been entertained by Blacks’ dancing from the beginning, or even before: captives on the slave ships of the Middle Passage were forced, at the point of a cat-o’-nine-tails, to dance on deck. The purpose of “dancing the slaves” was to keep them in good shape for their impending sale.
Then there was the imitation factor. By 1862, notes Abrahams, “playing black was one of the conventional ways in which Whites might amuse each other on social occasions of many sorts.”[vii] And well they might: there was a “Negro dance, in character” on stage as early as 1767.[viii]
Most people think of “old-timey” music, string bands, and other roots of modern Country music as White traditions. But as we’ve seen, southern Blacks played a string or two themselves. Grand Ole Opry harmonica player DeFord Bailey called it “black hillbilly music.”[ix] They played the fiddle in a more rhythmic style than Whites did, usually together with a banjo, through it took generations for that combo to form, possibly because of tuning problems.[1] Black string style is moaning, rhythmic, abrasive, vigorous and energetic.[x] It’s also marked by syncopation. Alan Jabbour delineated a difference in the bowing style of Whites in the Appalachians compared to those in the deep South: the uplanders are partial to “groupings of notes in a complex fabric of threes and twos, stylized anticipations of the beat, and other devices closely resembling the syncopations characteristic of twentieth-century American popular music.”[xi] He credited this style to the African American fiddlers present in the area.[2]
In the late nineteenth century, realizing they might not realize an extravagant income from fiddling, some Black fiddlers turned their hands to building railroads. Their contribution to the progress of the railroads took them into the Appalachian Mountains, heartland of the Scots/Irish-based “hillbilly” music, where they worked and sang together with the locals. Around the turn of the century this industrial progress changed the course of folk music history, ushering in an era of increased Black and White song sharing.
One reason people don’t know about Black string bands is that recording companies separated the Black and White music traditions for marketing purposes and then recorded and promoted according to their own conceptions of the market. They recorded White string bands and Black blues, period.[xii] Brownie McGhee, for one, recalled being refused permission to record hillbilly songs.[xiii] This narrowed and stereotyped the concept of African American music, all the while fostering a false impression that White hillbilly music grew up by itself without Black influence. Add this to the list of recording industry sins, under “omission.” [3]
Another reason people are unaware of this historical interchange is that most Blacks long ago quit playing the fiddle and the banjo. These instruments reminded them of slavery days and minstrel stereotypes, and they were consciously putting all that behind them in order to move on up to higher ground. Others just quit playing because they couldn’t get recorded. And in many cases, they simply moved on musically as Whites adopted the instruments, in an early example of a basic American cultural progression: Blacks innovate to strengthen or re-define a culture of their own, Whites discover and imitate it, and Blacks move on to the next innovation.[4] Banjo historian Cecilia Conway identifies the essence of White-Black culture interaction as apprenticeship.
[4] Blacks quit playing the banjo in droves before commercial recording got underway, coloring
– or un-coloring – our perception of banjo origins. But listen to Dink Roberts
(see Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia, discography)
and you’ll hear why some folks think the old banjo playing, not the blues,
is the clearest link to African music in the United States.
ABOUT THAT DRUM WITH STRINGS
Minstrels turned the Black songs that came with the banjo into the first popular music of the nation.[xiv] But note that the two parts of the South where Blacks played banjoes were also the places where the instrument was carried forward into new musical forms. In the Appalachians it became a core component of mountain music and later bluegrass; in New Orleans its four-string “tenor” version was essential in New Orleans jazz.[xv]
The banjo was a significant addition to White folk music. Before the banjo, Whites had fiddles, which were played in unison with the vocals but didn’t provide rhythm the way the banjo did (guitars came later, in the second half of the nineteenth century[xvi]). Old songs were adapted to the new instrument (which was new only to that region—it had been observed in similar form in West Africa in 1621, in the Caribbean in 1678, and in Maryland by 1744,[xvii] and had roots not only in West Africa but in the Middle East). In those times and places it was a gourd affair with gut strings. In the United States it was played only by Blacks and was concentrated in Virginia and nearby areas—it did not make it to the Deep South, except New Orleans, before 1835. This may be in part because of different African origins of captive workers in different regions of the South. And it helps explain why Joel Chandler Harris said he never saw a banjo played on a plantation down south.
To understand the dignity of the banjo—take a breath—we must recall its forbears, the halams of Mali and related instruments—and the fact that they were the lutes used by griots—the oral historians of Africa. Many Wolof people, from the Senegal area, came to America, among them halam players. In Jamaica in 1744 and again in 1793 we hear of the Jamaican variant, the superbly named merrywang. (There is today an International Merrywang Society, banjo players all. Or both, anyway.) Descriptions of the style of playing employed seem to match the downstroking style of US banjo players. And, retracing the route, an American visiting Mali in the late twentieth century picked up an ngouni, relative of the halam, and began frailing in banjo style. “Where did you learn to play the ngouni?” the Malian musicians exclaimed. Recall the tendency among White folk artists to preserve and protect old styles; in this case those were Black styles—African, in fact. We may ask ourselves: is this my beautiful music?
To call today’s banjo the descendent of the original gourd device may seem a stretch, but the changes from one to the other are arguably within the family. The gut, hemp or horsehair strings remained past the civil war, but the gourd was replaced by round cheese boxes (1850s) and then wood more generally. Minstrel (and southerner) Joel Sweeney may have invented the wooden rim, or may have been one of several who did. The sound chamber was covered by any animal unfortunate enough to meet the banjo’s maker. In fact, an instrument made with a cat skin resonator and using cat-gut strings should have been called a catbox. Cats, ever since, thank God for plastic and wire.
This brings us to the matter of the fifth string. Some say Sweeney may have added that too, but others say the string he added wasn’t the now-famous short, high-pitched drone string plucked with the thumb, but rather a bass string. Logically, a high-pitched drone string would be present because of its particular use, and Sweeney didn’t invent that. In the African halam, there are only two melody strings, and up to three strings tuned higher and used as fixed-pitch drones. Playing with a high drone string, says Conway, was “the only method of banjo playing documented before the end of the nineteenth century.” Yet there is no concrete evidence of a short, high drone in the American banjo before the Celtic innovators, aka Sweeney.
Later the banjo style morphed in new directions, as a rhythm instrument, mainly strummed. We hear it in the jug bands, and in early jazz, where the tenor banjo, a new mutation, was essential in the classic Dixieland period.
By the time of the civil war, the banjo had already been in White hands for a generation, notably those of Joel Sweeney’s brother Sam, who entertained his fellow Confederate troops with “Negro melodies”—Black culture giving solace to a pro-slavery army![xviii]
Whites probably began to strum the banjo around the 1830s when minstrel shows began. The big debate about Appalachian mountain banjo players is about whether they got their styles and chops from White minstrels or from Black players. The point is not as pointed as it might seem, since the minstrels played pretty much the same style as Black players—frailing, which is to say downstroking, which is to say clawhammer style. Circuses and medicine shows as well as minstrels traveled this region. And when you talk about mountains you also must consider rivers. In the 1850s there were minstrels steamboating down the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi, bringing banjos and brawls to the small towns on their way.
But riverboats came and went in a day.[5] And mountain players never reproduced the minstrel group—fiddle, banjo, and bones—nor its theatrical structures. Moreover, by the time Whites were playing banjo in the hills, in the 1840s, Blacks had been playing for a century right next door in the Piedmont, the area of rich cultural interaction in Virginia and North Carolina. Some Whites traveled between the regions, and some Blacks, both free and enchained, did live in the mountain area proper. Some had been brought as early as the 1770s by settlers fleeing British oppression. We have reports of Black banjo players in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1798, and drawings of others in Asheville, North Carolina after the civil war. And mountains have trails, trade routes, passageways, and crossroads where people meet. After the Civil War, Blacks came into the mountains to build railroads, and banjoes came with them.
Conway makes the case for the banjo as the link between slavery era music and the blues, the work song and the blues, and the work song and the entertainment song.[xix] Quite a résumé for a drum with strings. But then again, it’s the link between the drum and strings, too. The drum, after all, was banned in these United States, leaving the banjo to carry on with the song. The banjo precedes the blues, as it precedes ragtime—both of them indelibly stamped with banjoisms. And too, the banjo is a link to Africa. Africans played some variety of it, in fact, literally en route to becoming Americans: on slave ships.
In 1798 Black musicians played the banjo for a White dance in Knoxville, and a hundred years later, reports Conway, a White Appalachian man “played the Banjo Clog for a colored man to dance and he danced with his back to him and his foot hit the floor every time he hit a string. He never seen such a dancer in his life.”[xx] Frailer and hoofer together: it had become their beautiful music.
WHAT’S THE MATTER, WHAT’S THE MANNER?
From their Black counterparts the White mountain musicians learned railroad songs like “John Henry” and “Casey Jones.”[6] They learned new techniques on the fiddle, like left-hand slides and syncopations.
[6] Written by Black railroad man Wallace Saunders,
based on earlier African-American songs,
says Norman Cohen (Norman Cohen 1969, 241).
♬substitution: Compare White American fiddlers with Scottish and Irish fiddlers from the old country to get a feel for the Black influence. (This is a useful exercise whenever you’re looking for the hidden strands in hybrid music.) American fiddle music is hotter than its European roots, and more fluid. This can be ascribed partly to the wild frontier lifestyle, partly to Black influence.
Complicated fingerpicking guitar styles picked up by Whites from Black musicians were commonly referred to as “nigger pickin’,” [xxi] later more politely as “chicken pickin’.” They are played to this day by Country musicians—who may know where they came from—for Country fans, who almost unanimously don’t.[7]
Let’s zoom in here on three important aspects of music in which African styles were influential: improvisation, syncopation, and call and response.
Improvisation: White folk musicians tended to conserve a song more or less in the form and style of an early version—not necessarily the one they brought from over the sea, but a local update. They tended to play it repeatedly the same way, valuing the inheritance rather than any changes that might grow out of their new situation or changing conditions. For an example, note the note-for-note renditions of the older fiddle tunes that old-time fans are fond of, sounding remarkably similar to their British-Celtic sources.
Bill Malone cites the defensiveness of White southerners against attacks on slavery as a reason they “committed their region to a course of arrested development,”[xxii] which tended to freeze culture at a point that other parts of the country left behind. More rapid urbanization and industrialization in the North may have been more important factors, as we can see by comparing with other regions passed over by these developments, e.g. Canada’s Atlantic provinces and their neighbors in northern New England.
Improvisation, on the other hand, made a tune always new. It was the combination of past tradition with the current moment—the creation of a live statement by the performer identifying dynamically with their culture—that gave African-American musicians a thrill. There are deep differences among cultures that make it take a long time for a transplanted person to feel at home. Ernest Borneman comments that in spoken language,
[T]he African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality.[xxiii]
Syncopation: a lively rhythmic musical way of life that loosens up the hips and sometimes even makes you laugh out loud. You can syncopate anything. Eubie Blake once syncopated a classical piece on the piano, then turned to a White friend and said “That’s your ragtime.” In 1919 James Europe’s big band favored the Manhattan Opera House with a syncopated version of Peer Gynt, “with respectful apologies to Mr. Grieg.” In the 1940s, Lennie Tristano’s trio would jazz up Bach simply by moving the accents around. The melodies endured the conversion and even took on new life. That’s exactly what happened to European folk music in the American South as European-derived tunes encountered African rhythmic practices.
Call and response: In a typical example of the West African tradition, a leader sings a line and is answered by a male chorus and separately by a female chorus. In solo music, this was expressed through the use of the guitar to answer the vocal, and it crossed over into White folk traditions, as Malone describes:
Primarily through the influence of the Negro, the guitar came to be more than a simple accompanying instrument; it came to be a device for punctuating the moods and sentiments expressed…in effect, serving as a second voice.”[xxiv]
It also flourished in gospel singing and is heard in Black churches today, whether between parts of a choir or between the minister and the congregation. For a good example of music performed with and without call and response, see the film Cajun Country, in which we see the revelers participating as responders in the Black Cajun parties, but not so at the White gatherings.
Call and response is one of the main earmarks of West African music, and also occurs in certain European-based traditions. It is characteristic of community, and in particular communal manual labor—sea chanteys, for instance. In Europe, community long ago diversified and stratified, dissipating the call and response traditions and sending them to sea. In America, both community and communal work persisted among Africans for long enough to perpetuate the old style in forms of music like spirituals and jazz, and on into the various “White” forms, like Country and rock and roll, which were and are in reality combinations of African and European elements.
There are other call and response traditions throughout the world; for example, Indian classical music features improvised trading of riffs back and forth between drum and sitar, sitar and voice, etc. The important thing about the American scene is that the West African tradition opened the door for Europeans to re-enter that sector of the musical world, re-invigorating their improvisational capacity. Call and response often takes the form of trading phrases back and forth between instruments, very common today in Country music and rock but unknown in pre-Africanized southern White music.
Share And Share, But Not Alike
Anglo-Celtic folk and West African music had some elements in common: certain African-American musical mannerisms like the slight flattening of some notes (blue notes), vibrato, and pentatonic (five-note) scales already existed in the Anglo-Celtic tradition, and were reinforced and accentuated among Whites by their interaction with Blacks, who emphasized those stylistic devices to an even greater degree.[xxv] This process is called syncretism—a blending that requires points in common to build on.
In other words, the things the two traditions had in common were magnified. After all, Celtic and West African musics are not as different as, say, German and Chinese. In fact, many of the British songs preserved in the South dated back several centuries to a pre-diatonic Europe, when scales were “modal,” commonly pentatonic, as opposed to the major and minor scales we are familiar with today.[xxvi] This was partly due to the practice of singing without instruments or with simple accompaniment, which tends to reinforce simpler scales.
There were also, naturally, important White influences on the music of Blacks. During slavery, Blacks heard traveling musicians who brought various styles of music to places that wouldn’t have heard them otherwise. This is the land-locked version of the musical smorgasbord available in so many port cities. And in the upland border states, free Blacks heard and absorbed the backwoods variants of the Anglo-Celtic music. It was here that Blacks heard the White spirituals that would exert a strong influence on their own sacred song development (see below under Old Time Religion).
Having been stripped of much of their musical heritage, Africans in America naturally made use of the available materials, mainly White folk music. That’s why it’s so hard to dope out who originated any one song—it may be a Black composition in a White form with black stylistic changes, later popularized by a White singer—or it may not be. Long before wax cylinder recording, Black and White folk forms had blended and hybridized, permanently. As D.K. Wilgus wrote, “Matter tends to be European, and manner African…The resulting hybrid is a folk music which sounds African in the Negro tradition and European in the white tradition.”[xxvii] Or as Portia Maultsby called it, “unique ways of doing things and making things happen.”[xxviii] Denis-Constant Martin expressed it this way:
According to who was on the dance floor, black musicians, slave or free, selected rhythms and melodies which were eventually merged. Each racial and social community had music it considered its own, but with the passing of time the groups tended to become more interested in emerging new mixtures.[xxix]
Blacks adapted Anglo-Celtic music they heard in the hills, so that by the time they influenced the White string bands, they were already handing back something they had borrowed and altered to their taste. The effects can still be heard today: syncopation provides a jumpiness, dare we say a swing to the musics we call Country and bluegrass that wasn’t there before the music was colorized. Compare almost any modern Country rendition to the same song or one from the same genre from the old country—Scottish, Irish, English ballads—and you’ll hear that difference. You can also hear it in some of the older recordings of mountain music that were less blended with Black influences. But nothing is pure; listen for differences in the degree of cross-influence.
Blacks and Whites shared a body of song known as “common stock,” sometimes referred to as “Afro-Celtic tradition.”[xxx] At this late date it’s often hard to know where a song started; there came to be various versions, White, Black, or indifferent, of “Staggerlee,” “Mama Don’t Allow,” “Salty Dog,” “Corrina,” “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” “Buffalo Gals,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Get Along Home, Cindy,” “Arkansas Traveler,” and “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”
It was in the regions of greatest racial mixing that songs tended to cross back and forth over the color line—around Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia—the birthplace of Country music. Blacks and Whites became neighbors and borrowed each other’s music, returning it the better for wear.
Big Bill Broonzy told of gatherings called “two-way” picnics where the Blacks and Whites swapped songs.[xxxi] Dances, too: The folks around the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee already had a tradition of solo “flatfoot” dancing that adapted well to the Black tradition of “buck dancing.” The Black dancers were more polyrhythmic and looser, with energy flowing from the midsection in a way that was outside of most White dancers’ protocol. Blacks adapted White dances like the Irish jigs to their own style and gave them back.[8] The influences can still be seen today in old-time dance contests in the region (see the film Appalachian Journey). Clogging, an Appalachian development that combined numerous old-world folk dances, still uses buck dance steps, notably an alternation of heel and toe to make a “patter” sound. “Buck and wing” was a minstrel appellation for buck dancing, and that term is still used in clogging.[xxxii]
In set dances, reels and quadrilles, where the couples must execute the steps as a group, the caller intercedes between musician and dancer to coordinate and direct. We think of this caller as the icon of Euro-American square dance. But the calling is perhaps a bit less square than it looks: in its rhymed form it is very likely an African American contribution, dating to plantation corn frolics. Consider this, from the recollection of one former chained worker:
All eight balance, and all eight swing
All left allemond, and right hand grand
Meet your partner and promenade, eight
Then march till you come straight
First lady out to couple on the right,
Swing Mr. Adam and swing Miss Eve,
Swing old Adam before you leave
John Szwed and Morton Marks make the case that these calls are more elaborate, humorous and subtle than European dance directions, and trace them to the
Afro-American dance instruction tradition which extends from “Ballin’ the Jack” to “The Twist” and beyond…at least partly rooted in the older tradition in which African master drummers signal and direct dancers.
Finally, consider this elaborate and witty call:
Great big fat man down in the corner
Dance to de gal wid de blue dress on her;
You little bit er feller widout eny vest
Dance to de gal in de caliker dress.
Git up, Jake, an’ turn your partner,
Shake dem feet as you kno’ you ‘orter
___________________________________
FRANK JOHNSON
One notable Black dance caller was also a notable fiddler and led his own group, the Frank Johnson Band, for decades starting around 1830. Working throughout the South, they played at picnics, state fairs, and college commencement balls (e.g., at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, an entirely White and male campus). Johnson played “square dances all the time — and, O, my, how Old Frank Johnson could call the figures: ‘Balance All.’ ‘Swing Your Partner,’ ‘Ladies’ Change,’ ‘Back Again, Doocee-do,’ ‘Swing Corners All,’ etc., etc.”[xxxiii] The New Bern Times proclaimed in 1866, “Frank Johnson has grown into an institution. He has brought the science of brass band music to such a high state of perfection that few dare to compete with him, and as to the violin, it’s no use talking.” [xxxiv]
___________________________________
The Black vocal styles, like the calling and the dancing, were more flowing and improvisatory too. The White hillbilly singers sang in a tight-throated style, achieving beauty through ornamentation. Bluegrass maintains much of this old style. Why? In the old backwoods days, Puritanism held sway and gripped the country folk with a certain attitude about looseness of expression. They were agin it; not only that, it made them nervous. They may have been free in a non-slavery sort of way, but they were not so liberated sensually, if I may be allowed such an opinion. Blacks, to the contrary, were more enslaved socially and economically but were less burdened by guilt over hip movement; let us simply say that their African spiritual and cultural roots were somewhat at variance with Calvinism.
West African cultures traditionally use music and dance in a functional way, in connection with other doings in their lives. This integration of art and life has been largely lost in cultures that have developed class stratifications, separation of city dwellers from country folks and mental labor from manual, and the like. Only vestiges of such integration can be found in Western European cultures. Work songs, for example, are mainly found where there is group manual work, and coming of age songs are associated with various religions. But a society that integrates religion, art, nature, work, and community will produce a markedly more function-oriented art than a society that has developed different classes with different educations and social/economic roles—art will move in those societies toward the narrower realm of performance and spectation.
Africans in America were forcibly cut off from African culture, so they became Americans, i.e., African-Americans. They retained some essentials of their music, and culture generally, but much was lost. They used the songs and forms they found, imbuing them with their own styles and attitudes and rhythms, which in turn added something their White neighbors and even their masters needed. Blacks did such a bang-up job of adapting the music that surrounded them that Whites adapted it right back. Some of the adaptations were rhythmic, some were form (call and response); some were minor tuneups and some were overhauls. Thus was born the litter of delightful variations that comprise American music.[9]
No wonder, then, that Whites have gravitated toward Black culture. It is an integrative tradition; it expresses group experience and history and represents both the individual’s struggle for self-expression and the group’s struggle for survival, both undertaken against oppressive odds. This community communication is thus severely and embarrassingly reduced when it is taken by others for mere entertainment. This music is more than that. It offers an antidote, an anti-don’t. It provides a way out to a more relaxed, more earthy style, less akin to Puritanism than to the Celtic pantheistic roots so assiduously stamped out by Christianity in the old country. When we partake of this cultural product, we re-contact lost roots of our own as well as those of others. It is potentially an integrative recreation in that it is both a way back and a way forward. Abrahams put it this way:
[O]ne of the realities of American life is that certain features of African American performance style will remain strange and alluring to those outside the culture…Simply fighting through to understandings of the primordial exuberance and the historical continuities of African American culture unlocks a message of cultural vitality in the face of adversity that should provide food for the soul for some time.[xxxv]
Songwriter Gus Kahn described the double-edged sword more brutally:
The South is the romantic home of our Negro; he made it a symbol of longing that we, half in profiteering cold blood, but half in surrender to the poetry of the black, carried over into our American song.[xxxvi]
Unfortunately, much of the interplay between the cultures was later obscured through the use of the work of highly respected folklorists like England’s Cecil Sharp and Harvard’s Francis James Child. Sharp came to Appalachia in 1916 in search of a trove of Old English ballads, and simply didn’t record anything he hadn’t come searching for.[xxxvii],[10] When it came time to tell the story of folk music, a narrow view of the Appalachians as a pure European cultural incubator prevailed. This view persisted despite the birth in this region of Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Clara Smith, Maceo Pinkard, Howard Armstrong, Leslie Riddle, Brownie McGhee, Josh White, Odetta, and Arnold Shultz, many of whom we’ll meet up with further along in the story.
[10] Maud Karpeles, who did advance work for Sharp in his Appalachian travels,
was reputedly told that “Mr Sharp doesn’t want to hear n—– music.”
Peggy Seeger, First Time Ever, Faber & Faber, 2017, 148.
Sharp and his American guide, Olive Dame Campbell, did notice a difference in performance between the Appalachian White singers and those of the British Isles:
They have one vocal peculiarity, however, which I have never noticed amongst English folk-singers, namely, the habit of dwelling arbitrarily upon certain notes of the melody, generally the weakest accents. This practice, which is almost universal, by disguising the rhythm and breaking up the monotonous regularity of the phrases produces an effect of improvisation and freedom from rule which is very pleasing.[xxxviii]
What they didn’t notice was how prevalent that habit was in African American music. When folklorists note differences between populations in diaspora, they need to look around for the source of the difference. It could be an innovation based on new circumstances, but it could also be an influence from often invisible neighbors.
A generation before, the Spanish-American War had been accompanied by “a renewed emphasis on the mission of America’s “Anglo-Saxon” people,”[xxxix] to put it politely. Given the changes then being wrought by urbanization, industrialization, migration, and war, some folklorists were concerned that “White” folk culture was being polluted by other influences. Their efforts to guard its purity included folkloric studies that concealed the true mixed origins of our musical roots for generations to come. Here lies an early lesson in the power of the media to distort by omission: a false picture painted by wishful Whites, bequeathing to a diverse, pluralist nation a dangerously distorted perception of itself. Dangerous? Ralph Ellison put it this way:
[T]o think unclearly about that segment of reality in which I find my existence is to do myself violence. To allow others to go unchallenged when they distort that reality is to participate not only in that distortion but to accept…a violence inflicted…[xl]
The work of the British folklorists was centered in the old Celtic areas of the Appalachians, but similar operations occurred beyond that realm. Cowboy music—later “Country and Western”—was in fact a creation of White, Black and Mexican hands, but is perceived as an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. Through these operations we came to appear as something other than what we are. Let’s have another look.
[i] Cited in Rublowsky, 71.
[ii] Lomax, Esquire, 108.
[iii] Fithian, Philip Vickers, 1957, 61-62.
[iv] A Concise Historical Account of All the British Colonies in North-America…, Dublin: Printed for C. Jenkin, 1776, 213.
[v] “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave,” in Bear, James A., Jr., ed., Jefferson at Monticello, Charlottesville:U. Press of Virginia, 1967, 22.
[vi] Nichoas Creswell, quoted in Epstein, 121.
[vii] Abrahams, 137.
[viii] New York Journal, in Clarke, 21.
[ix] Wolfe 1990, 32.
[x] Conway 1995, 13.
[xi] Jabbour, 254-255.
[xii] Wolfe 1990, 33.
[xiii] Titon, 55.
[xiv] Cantwell, 91.
[xv] Conway 1995, 59.
[xvi] Douglas Green, 1976, 50.
[xvii] Cantwell, 91; Conway, 56. This section relies heavily on Conway, 175-198.
[xviii] Conway 1995, 109.
[xix] Op. cit., 26.
[xx] Op. cit., 159, story from Andy Cahan and Alice Gerrard.
[xxi] Lomax 1960, 276.
[xxii] Malone 1968, 4.
[xxiii] Ernest Borneman, “The Roots of Jazz”.17. Cited in Pratt, 87.
[xxiv] Malone 1968.
[xxv] Wilgus, 359-60.
[xxvi] Nettl, 42.
[xxvii] Wilgus 1959, 363.
[xxviii]Maultsby, in Holloway, 205.
[xxix] Martin, op. cit., p 33-34.
[xxx] Wald, Sing Out, 39:1, 11.
[xxxi] Clarke, 145.
[xxxii] Royce, 116.
[xxxiii] (Woodson, Frank S. (14 February 1901). “Recollections of the Band that Excelled Sousa”. The Gold Leaf. 20 (10). Henderson, N.C. p. 1 – via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress.)
[xxxiv] Chaney, Matt (2017-12-01). “Blacks Electrified Early American Music and Dance”. ChaneysBlog. Retrieved 2019-05-15.
[xxxv] Abrahams, 152-53.
[xxxvi] Locke 1936, 50.
[xxxvii] Malone 1979, 31.
[xxxviii] Campbell and Sharp 1917, x, quoted in Hay, 8.
[xxxix] ibid., 29.
[xl] Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” New Leader, February 3, 1964.