The African Diaspora & Music
“Captive Africans followed many routes from their homelands to other parts of the world. The map shows the trans-Atlantic movement of these captives in comparative perspective for the centuries since 1500 only. Estimates of the ocean-borne trade are more robust than are those for the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes, but it is thought that for the period from the end of the Roman Empire to 1900 about the same number of captives crossed the Atlantic as left Africa by all other routes combined.”
Some questions I’m thinking about...
Ngoni: one of many names for a type of West African Lute Instrument
“Kaira,” traditional music from Mali, performed on the n’goni by Mussa Diabaté
More Ngoni
Bassekou Kouyate at G8
“This is one of the earliest existent accounts of the banjo in the Americas, courtesy of the Scots naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who visited Jamaica in 1687 and published his book in 1707. Already, you can see the differences between these "strum strumps" and their West African cousins like the akonting and the ngoni: the banjo's flat fretboards and friction-based tuning pegs, borrowed from European instrument making. You can't see it in this drawing, but early banjos also had cultural and spiritual symbols on them, like cross-shaped sound holes on the side of the gourd's resonating body.”
Haiti: Twobadou
Altiery Dorival -
Mesdames yo ce lamp
“This is a video from 1928 of what appears to be Ina Rae Hutton's Ingenues. You can see at this point white people were quite comfortable with the banjo.”
Minute 39-44ish
Racialization of the banjo
Carolina Chocolate Drops “Cornbread and Butterbeans”
Afropop: Africa & the Blues
Trait by Trait Analysis
Slide guitar technique, West African savanna tonality
Podcast clip: 6:27-10:41
Fiddle interacting with vocal in pentatonic mode
Podcast clip: 11:10 - 16:31
Tikar women, 1964, from central Cameroon
compared to “Hardworking Woman” by Mississippi Matilda in 1936
Podcast clip: 17:40 - 19:31
Ancient Negritic style of West African Savanna &
Arabic-Islamic style
Podcast clip: 26 - 27:42
Timeline pattern missing from early forms of African-American Music
Gerhard Kubik “Africa and the Blues” page 203
“The people who were transferred from the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, and elsewhere to Mississippi and the other news southern territories during the first decades of the 19th century were carriers of the neo-African musical culture that presented a selection of traits from quite distinctive African regions. Under the new social circumstances, it then turned out that individual music has a better chance of surviving in the social climate where the African community spirit had been targeted for suppression. The new forms also expressed the new mood. In this process, culture traits from the west central Sudan belt gained wide currency in rural areas of the deep South, because they responded best to the new sociopsychological situation. Among the various new traditions that arose one was the blues. The bearers of these developments, however, were probably a minority within the population of African descendents on the farms. But there stylistic seeds began to sprout, while others seeds were doomed.”
Role of the Individual in Musical Developments
“It is normal that individuals determine history’s direction—be it political or art history. It is not the museum. In European art history, this was acknowledged long ago, and there is no reason why Africa should be an exception. For this reason I was warning readers in my book about mapping population numbers against successful cultural traditions. Sometimes it is a minority culture that makes a breakthrough and then becomes the majority culture. There is good reason to assume that many of the Arabic-Islamic stylistic traits that were processed in the Bentonia style—and generally in the Mississippi Delta blues—were introduced by a few individuals who had perpetuated a certain way of declamatory singing, wavy, ornamental intonation and pentatonic tonal systems within their families.”
Late 19th/Early 20th Century Criollo Culture
Revival of Afro-Peruvian identity 1950s-60s
Landó Music
“Samba Malató” - Lucila Campos
“Lando” - Peru Negro
The Siddi People
Indians of African Descent
Some questions I’m thinking about...