Saint Maurice, patron saint of soldiers.

Here are some examples of what African music from the earliest days of cross-Atlantic cultural encounters might have sounded like.

When we talk about traditional African folk music, we have to qualify what we mean by “traditional.” Seventeenth-century west African dances, like the Pandulungu, Guandu, or Cubango from Angola, have been lost. Most of the folk music that is most directly tied to African traditions from the days before the Atlantic slave trade can be found in its most undiluted forms in South and Central America and the West Indies, such as this invocation to the ancestors of the Maroon people of Jamaica.

These African traditions were inexorably changed by the cross-cultural encounters brought about by the slave trade.

The bomba, a traditional musical style of Puerto Rico, owes much to west African drumming, and was first documented in the early sixteenth century. It’s a call-and-response challenge between the dancers and the drummers, with the dancer leading and the drummers responding.

Another Puerto Rican dance form, originally from Angola:

Afro-Colombian traditional music incorporates the marimba:

More traditional Afro-Colombian music:

Three African-American/Afro-Caribbean fiddle tunes transcribed in the eighteenth century, played on a replica of a homemade slave fiddle.

Even in Congo Square, the music played by enslaved African-Americans had already been changed by its translation from the coast of Africa to the West Indies and to the American mainland.

The history of African music is, in a sense, a history of loss.