ISLAMIC INFLUENCE ON BLACK MUSIC IN AMERICA Just as African Muslims brought their religion, technology and folk tales, they also brought their music. Jobson in the 17th century and Park in the 18th century remarked on the widespread presence of music in their travels among the Wolof, Mandingo and Fula. African instruments described by Jobson and Park included one-string fiddles, various types of lutes, flutes, harps, a xylophone (the bala), bowstrings (the string is blown on and struck with a stick—this is the American diddly bow), various drums and the clapping of hands, which appeared to constitute a necessary part of the chorus.[39] Virtually every village had a jilli (griot) who sang extempore songs in praise of chiefs and the ancestors as well as songs concerning important historical events. Other musicians were described as a class of devout Muslims who traveled throughout the land singing religious songs and performing religious ceremonies.[40] Some of these traveling musicians were actually Muslim traders who simply brought their music with them wherever they traveled.[41] Senegambian/sahelian music like their counterpart in the Muslim world was a mixture of an old African tradition and a newly inherited Islamic-Arabic musical tradition, producing a new cultural manifestation that possessed elements of both. Influence went both ways because the Moors adopted many African elements as witnessed in the uniqueness of North African music, Southern Spanish music and traditional Portuguese music like the fado. In trying to identify African influence in African American music, especially the blues, many scholars have come to agree with Paul Olivers early contention that the blues was a product of acculturation, of the meeting of African (notably Senegambian) musical traditions with Euro-American (notably British) ones.[42] (Oliver 125, see also Kubah, Coolen) By Senegambia, Oliver and others refer to the shared musical tradition of the Sahel crescent zone that stretches from Senegal/Gambia across Mali to Northern Nigerian and Hausa land.[43] The main elements of their argument that the main African influence on the blues stems from the Senegambia are as follows: 1. The ensemble of musical instrument in the Senegambia and the Sahel crescent, which consists of the long-neck lute, one-string fiddles and bones/rattles/tapping on a calabash, is remarkably similar to the fiddle, banjo and tambourines which dominated African American music from the 17th to 19th century. Various plucked lutes were prominent instruments among the Wolof, Mandingo, Fula, Soninke and Hausa. These instruments whether the five-strong halam of the Wolof, the three-string koonting of the Mandingo or the Hausa komo were most likely the grandfather of the banjo.[44] An early colonial slave song says that Negro Sambo play fine banger, make his fingers go like handsaw. (???) This Fula, Mandingo or Wolof Sambo was obviously an early master of the banjo.[45] (Kubah and Oliver, 57) A runaway slave notice mentions a Sambo who is an expert with the fiddle. (?) African fiddles whether the riti of the Wolof, the gogi or the Hausa or the gogeru of the Fula were common instruments in the Sahel crescent. The European fiddle was the most common instrument in the antebellum era and an African American who was familiar with the African fiddle would have been highly motivated in the acquisition of prestige and time-off to pick up the new European fiddle and master it. The typical early black musical group of the Caribbean and South America included drums and gongs, scraps and voices which would correspond to an ensemble of the West African rain forest. The early blues bands by contrast consisted very often of fiddle, guitars and sometimes homemade percussion, which would easily accommodate techniques learned in the savannah groups with their bowed goge, lutes and rattles.[46] 2. The blues tradition and much of other black musical forms which revolves around a solo performer accompanied by a plucked-string instrument does not have a parallel in the cultures of the West African rain forest and the Congo, but it does in the Sahel crescent. Griots and other traveling musicians of the Sahel performed like the blues men in the midst of an active and noisy crowd that constantly comments on and dances to their music.[47] Musicologists generally agree that Africas black bluesmen have, in essence, reinstituted the high art of the African griot. (?) 3. African American field hollers (a few melancholy, lonesome lines sung individually by a worker) and work songs are widely considered to be one of the predecessors of the blues. Hollers and work songs are rare among the people of the rain forest but plentiful in the Sahel crescent. A researcher found a match for a Mississippi prison holler performed by a man nick named Tangle Eye with a recording from Senegal. When we intercut these two pieces on a tape, it sounded as if Tangle Eye and the Senegalese were answering each other, phase by phase. As one listens to this musical union, spawning thousands of miles and hundreds of years, the conviction grows that Tangle Eyes forebears [sic] must have come from Senegal bringing this song style with them.[48] Scholars have found unique similarities between American work songs and work songs among the Hausa and cattle herding Fula,[49] so much so that some feel the field holler originated with African cattle herders.[50] 4. The blues and jazz style of bending notes, melisma (ornamental phrasing of several notes in one syllable which is typical of the Muslim call to prayer), slurs, and raspy voices are all characteristics of music in the Sahel zone. These aspects of Sahel music are undoubtedly a direct influence of Arab/Islamic music. Billy Holiday was master of this style. As sung by her [Billy Holiday] a note may (in the words of Glen Coutler) begin `slightly under pitch, absolutely without vibrato, and gradually be forced up to dead center from where the vibrato shakes free, or it may trail off mournfully; or at final cadences, the note is a whole step above the written one and must be pressed slowly down to where it belongs. Coincidence or not, all these features are found in Islamic African music and hardly at all in other styles.[51] 5. The absence of polyrhythm and asymmetric time-lines and the presence of emphasis instead of off-beats in blues and early jazz are also characteristic of Sahel music. On the other hand, the music of the rain forest and the Congo with its heavy emphasis on drumming is characterized by polyrhythms and asymmetric time-lines and its influence is reflected in the black music of the Caribbean and South America.[52] Arguments that the drum was prohibited in the U.S. and that enslaved Africans lived in closer proximity to whites are not persuasive because drums are not the only means to express polyrhythms and the cultural impulse for polyrhythm would not have been totally stifled by the influence of white culture. A more plausible answer is the influence of Sahel culture in the development of African American music.[53] 5. Like the blues, Sahel music typically uses pentatonic scales that allows inflections and shadings of notes (the blues notes) as well as the use of a central tone reference, often a drone stroke which renders it out of turn around which the melody revolves.[54] The blues tonality is not found in rain forest and Congo music or in Latin American music. In 1968 he [the Mali musician Ali Farka Toure] heard a recording of John Lee Hooker and was entranced. Initially he thought Hooker was playing music derived from Mali. Several Malian song forms—including musical traditions of the Bambara, Songhay and Fulani ethnic groups—rely on minor pentatonics (five note) scales which are similar to the blues scales.[55] While discounting the Islamic influence on the blues, musicologists Gunther Schuller does note with interest that three of the six principal modes in Indo-Pakistani music are nothing but blues scales.[56] The conclusion that the blues and Indo/Pakistani scales might have a common ancestor, namely classical Islamic/Arab music, seems to elude him. 6. There are also numerous playing techniques that are common to blues and Sahel music including fingering techniques, combined interweaving of melodic-rhythmic lines, and the cupping of the ear while playing the blues harmonica which is prominent in the Sahel and throughout the Muslim world.[57] 7. The repetitive structure of the blues resembles the Senegambian musical structure called the fodet, which is a musical phrase of a fixed number of 6-24 beats, which is repeated in cyclic form. More important, fodets parallel blues structure in the organization of their tonal character. Like the blues, different phrases of the fodet are marked off through the use of different tonal centers. Normally centering on a tonic path (danne), most fodets contain at least one phrase that centers on a secondary tonal center.[58] Senegambians and other African Muslims were not the only enslaved Africans so why did their influence predominate over other groups, especially the peoples from the West African rain forest and Central Africa who were in fact numerically larger. A possible answer is that Senegambians arrived early and they found a musical culture, which, instead of suppressing their own inflected practice, actually sustained and reinforced it in that European musical instruments better matched the experience of Senegambian, and that British and especially Scottish music had similarities in the tonal sensibilities of Sahel music.[59] Like basket weaving, Senegambians, as early arrivals, established the first forms of blues music and later arrivals simply adopted the practice. The African musicologist, Grehart Kubik, who actually specializes in music of the rain forest peoples, concludes: Many traits that have been considered unusual, strange and difficult to interpret by earlier blues researchers can now be better understood as a thoroughly processed and transformed Arabic-Islamic stylistic component. What makes the blues different from African American music in the Caribbean and in South America is, after all, its Arabic-Islamic stylistic ingredients.[60]
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 00:21:18 +0000
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