Write a formal essay on one early American music tradition, either Native American chant or any one of the four early American folk song traditions described in Chapter 2. This essay should relate to Discussion 3 and 4 and mention relevant titles from this week’s listening examples. The listening example charts in the textbook can be used as a guide to help you write about the music style of the listening examples, even if you have little or no background in music.
2
Early Folk Music
Folk music refers to simple songs and instrumental pieces whose origin has been lost or forgotten, or to music composed in an informal style traditional in certain cultures. Unpretentious, easy to remember and to perform, folk music appeals to inexperienced listeners and sophisticated musicians alike.
The folk music of the United States springs from many ethnic and cultural sources: English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, and other European influences abound. Africa, too—particularly West Africa—introduced an immeasurable wealth of musical sounds and traditions to folk as well as to other musics in America. Much of the recent urban and country folk music that we shall consider in Chapters 11 and 14 is deeply rooted in the traditional music introduced here.
Spanish Traditions
The Spanish founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. It is the oldest continuously surviving European settlement in the United States, and Spanish music traditions remain strong in that area of the country. (A historian recently pointed out that not until 2055 will the flag of the United States have flown over St. Augustine as long as the Spanish flag did.) In regions of the Southwest as well, one still hears Spanish folk songs and dances and folk hymns (religious songs) reflecting their origins in seventeenth-century Spain or more recent Mexico. Missionary priests taught Indians to sing hymns, for example, and Spanish troops guarding forts near the Christian missions sang ballads and love songs at their work.
Street vendors’ songs, work songs, lullabies, and all manner of Spanish folk dances, or bailes, formed an ordinary part of the Spanish settlers’ lives in the New World. Performed now as in years past to celebrate engagements, weddings, birthdays, and other happy social events, such rollicking bailes as El Cutilio (an Optional Listening Example and Encore, p. 31) lighten the hearts of those who hear them—though few remember how to dance the intricate steps popular 150 years ago.
Many slaveholders harshly discouraged references to African gods and religions in any traditional song or dance. Especially British Protestants, who considered African music customs savage and heathen, did everything possible to eradicate
36
their slaves’ native religion and culture. Partly to this end, the first babies born to slaves in this country (unlike those in other areas of the New World, such as Haiti, Cuba, or Brazil) often were separated from their families to be raised on other plantations. There they learned African lore and language from older Africans, of course, but they also began to accrue experience with America and with English.
Slaves in New England worked much as slaves worked in the South but were treated with more leniency, often enjoying a measure of free time in which to entertain themselves and their masters by singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments. The admiration they excited by their music was not always to the slaves’ advantage, however. Newspaper lists of slaves for sale and of runaways often referred to their outstanding musical abilities, adding to their desirability as commodities to be owned and abused.
As adults, the first generation of slaves born here began to develop their own music, rooted in African customs and sounds, but genuinely African American, expressing their new experience in a new sort of African American language. Whereas the first slaves had sung in African dialects, work songs and other songs gradually came to be sung more in English, pronounced, however, with African rhythms. For a long time, some African words continued to be used, perhaps for the purpose of obscuring seditious meaning from white people. When even the blacks could no longer understand the African languages, meaningless but rhythmic syllables were used as well.
Field Hollers Most of the slaves forced to work on the plantations in what is now the southeastern United States came from West Africa, where they had commonly integrated music with their daily work. Particular kinds of songs became associated with certain tasks, such as fishing, weaving, hunting, or tilling their farms. In America, the familiar fishing, weaving, and hunting songs lost relevance, but slaves, such as those pictured in Figure 2.3, poured all the
37
anguish of their new, tragic experience into field hollers—loud, rhythmically flexible, emotionally expressive chants or cries sung by a solitary voice. Some field hollers had words (“Where are you-u-u …?”) but most, as in Listening Examples 7 and 8, used neutral syllables easily heard over distances.
FIGURE 2.3
In a Cotton Field. Wood engraving, drawn by Horace Bradley, 1887.
Source: Library of Congress
Listening Example 7
Field Holler
With hollers such as this, people established wordless but heart-warming contact with fellow workers who, hearing the poignant cries, could respond with expressive hollers of their own.
Timbre Solo male voice.
Melody A simple, narrow, mournful phrase on three tones, repeated.
Rhythm Free, flexible.
Text Neutral syllables, easy to sing and to hear over distances.
Listening Example 8
Father’s Field Call
This father’s field call or holler illustrates the high falsetto range, lying above the normal, full, chest voice, which enhanced the ability to call over long distances.
Timbre Solo male voice in the falsetto range.
Melody Begins with an upward leap, succeeded by a naturally falling inflection. This call is reminiscent, in fact, of the familiar “Yoo-hoo.”
Rhythm Free, flexible.
Text Wordless.
Ring Shouts Another African tradition translated to an African American experience was the religious shout, or ring shout, performed at religious services or camp meetings. The “shouters” formed a ring and shuffled energetically to the singing of a spiritual (see pp. 78–82) or hymn. Though careful to hardly lift their feet from the floor (lifting the feet would constitute dancing, a
38
forbidden entertainment at services), the shouters, accompanied by singers and sometimes singing themselves, gradually quickened their pace, as they became caught up in an ecstasy of religious fervor that often kept them moving until they fell from sheer exhaustion.
Work Songs In Africa, another kind of song, the work song, accompanied such rhythmic tasks as rowing, hoeing, or chopping trees. Traditional work songs expressed joy and pride in hard work for one’s family and land, and gratitude to the gods for their help.
In America, too, slaves made up, or improvised, work songs as they labored in pain and sorrow, adapting the words, however, to their tragic new condition. Work songs often accompanied American plantation slaves, setting the pace and synchronizing the movements of groups of forced laborers. The songs, strophic in form, were performed in the characteristic West African music practice known as call-and-response, in which the leading lines of each verse, sung by a single voice, alternate with a repeated phrase, or refrain, sung by the group.
Listening Example 9, “Hammer, Ring,” recorded at a state penitentiary in Texas in 1934, indicates how work songs facilitate the movements and lighten the mood of laborers working under the most difficult and depressing conditions.
Listening Example 9
“Hammer, Ring” (excerpt)
Hammer songs accompanied men driving the spikes that fastened long steel rails to wooden railroad ties. From the dramatic Bible story of Noah and the ark, the leader of this hammer song, recorded in 1934, improvises simple lines of text, to which the men—swinging ten-pound hammers freely from the shoulder in a complete circle about the head—rhythmically respond, “Hammer, ring!” The relentless rhythm and driving energy of the piece support and reinforce the regular rhythm of the hammering men.
Notice occasional variations in the inflection of the melody line, which add emphasis or emotional intensity to the delivery. Notice, too, the occasional calls, cries, or shouts of the workers. While their response is generally sung in unison, occasional flights of creativity among individuals vary the texture of their singing.
Composer The song was improvised by Jesse Bradley and a group at State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas.
Genre Work song (hammer song).
Timbre Male singing voices.
39
Melody The melody largely consists of the tones of a minor triad: The verses use one and three of the triad, and the refrain sometimes adds five.
Texture Monophonic/heterophonic.
Form Strophic. Each verse consists of a line of text, repeated, with the refrain “Hammer, ring!” interspersed between lines. The leader sings each line; the hammering men sing the refrain (call-and-response). Occasionally the leader repeats the introductory verse.
Meter Duple.
0:00 Won’t you ring, old hammer? …
0:06 Broke the handle on my hammer …
0:13 Got to hammerin’ the Bible …
Freedom Songs During the first half of the nineteenth century, a movement known as the Underground Railroad assisted slaves seeking escape to free states, Canada, or elsewhere. This network of abolitionists, religious groups, and other sympathizers provided fleeing individuals transportation, supplies, and safe houses along secret routes. Their dangerous work allowed a tragically small, yet significant, number of slaves to reach freedom. Songs such as “No More Auction Block for Me” (Listening Example 10) encouraged them on their perilous mission.
Musical Instruments In Africa, drums often accompanied work songs, sometimes providing two or three different underlying rhythmic patterns in a complexity difficult for Western ears even to hear. Using drums for communication as well as for music, West Africans developed an extremely fine sense of changes in tone and timbre, together with truly remarkable rhythmic techniques.
Many slaves brought small drums and simple string instruments with them on the slave ships, where their captors sometimes compelled them to perform music to keep them occupied and pass the time; but slaveholders on southern plantations generally banned the use of African drums, fearing that the thrilling drumbeats might incite revolt. Slaves compensated for the loss of their drums by improvising percussive instruments from empty oil drums, metal washbasins, and whatever else might be available and by clapping, body-slapping, and stamping the rhythms of their songs and dances. Rattles or bits of shell or bone added to simple instruments further enhanced the driving beat.
“No More Auction Block for Me”
This haunting freedom song from about 1800 expresses the determination of slaves to escape the humiliation of being sold at auction, the agony of separation from family, and the terrible physical punishment to which they were daily subjected. The melody, almost identical to a traditional West African song, inspired two twentieth-century anthems of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” both of which can be heard on YouTube. Solemnly sung here by Odetta (Odetta Holmes, 1930–2008), the song evokes the anguish of the slaves and their determination to achieve freedom.
Composer Anonymous.
Genre Freedom song.
Timbre Contralto voice (Odetta), quietly accompanied by mixed chorus.
Texture Homophonic.
Form Strophic.
Meter Quadruple.
0:00 No more auction block for me …
0:31 No more pint of salt for me …
1:04 No more driver’s lash for me …
1:35 No more auction block for me …
West African gourd banjos (variously called banjar, banza, and other similar names) arrived in the American colonies by way of the slave trade in the late seventeenth century. Developed from ancient Arab prototypes, the African banjo typically had four strings: three long and one short, the short string providing a rhythmic and harmonic drone (a repeated tone of constant pitch). By stretching an animal skin across the open side of a hollowed-out gourd or calabash, slaves created their own primitive banjos, destined in more sophisticated form (such as the four-string banjo seen in Figure 2.4) to provide limitless entertainment for Americans and others of assorted ethnicity and culture.
FIGURE 2.4
A four-string banjo.
Source: Library of Congress
What of African Music Survives Today? Today’s African American musics are deeply rooted in African traditions that arrived in the New World with the first slaves. Call-and-response, for example, became a basic characteristic of
41
African American vocal and instrumental music, as we shall see when we study blues, vocal and instrumental jazz, the religious folk songs called spirituals, and many other kinds of contemporary black music. Improvisation is inherent in the concept of jazz and colors much other music as well. Much African American music is still based on the “bent” or flexible tones of the blues scale (see p. 148), unheard in this country until the first West Africans arrived. Even more apparent is the emphasis in African American music on rhythm over melody, and the complexity of African rhythms compared with those of Western (European) music.
