Southern Musical Tradition and the African Tradition

Southern Musical Tradition and the African Tradition

The second major tributary of the southern musical tradition comes

from the African continent and is the heritage import of the five million

slaves brought to North America against their will to provide the bulk of

the labor in the pre-industrial agrarian south. Contemporary blues, while

not exclusively black music by any means, remains largely black in terms of

its leading performers and, to a lesser extent, its listening audience.

The forerunner of the modern urban blues was, however, almost exclusively

black and was completely southern and rural. It was, and is, a music born

out of the experience of slavery and Jim Crow segregation with their

attendant poverty, alienation and suppression. As a musical genre, this

remarkable and durable expression has an enormous relevance for the

historical development of southern music in general and the southern black

experience in particular.

Modern blues evolved out of the southern "country blues" and became an

urban phenomenon in the same social, economic and demographic processes

which urbanized black Americans during the two or three decades prior to

World War II. Thus, an examination of the black country blues provides a

potentially fruitful vehicle for the study of southern rural culture viz a

viz the black experience. At the very least, it provides a means for

assessing the perceptions of southern culture which were held and

articulated by a sensitive group of observers -- the bluesmen and

blueswomen of the rural south. The extent to which their music was

received, popularized and appreciated by their audience provides a broader

look at the hopes and drea...

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development, display similar structural and thematic content and have,

since the 1960s, begun to recognize and celebrate these commonalities.

Works Cited:

Chapple, Steve and Reebee Garofalo. Rock and Roll is Here to Pay.

Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1977.

Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and

Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1968.

Morthland, John. The Best of Country Music. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984.

Oliver, Paul. Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues.

London: November Books, Limited, 1970.

Smith, M.G. "Social and Cultural Pluralism," in Annals of the New York

Academy of Sciences 83 (January, 1957):763-777.

Van den Berghe, Pierre. Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective, 2nd ed.

New York: Wiley, 1978.