Category: African Musical Traditions

  • Affrilachian Banjo and Pre-Blues Traditions

    Dink Roberts (1894-1989). John Snipes (1899-1983). Elizabeth Cotten (1893-1987), who was left-handed, adapted both banjo and guitar by simply turning them upside-down. Rhiannon Giddens’s version of “Georgie Buck”: Giddens’s mentor, banjo player Odell Thompson (1911-1994), with his cousin, fiddler Joe Thompson (1918-2012). For more, browse here: https://affrilachianmusic.weebly.com/stylistic-and-instrumental-origins.html The banjo as a genteel parlor instrument: Plink-a-Pong,…

  • Barbados

    On the new album Our Native Daughters, featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Amethyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell (above), there is a banjo tune titled “Barbados,” believed to be the first western notation of a slave song in the new world. The melody was transcribed by one D.W. Dickson in Barbados in the 18th century. Giddens…

  • Beethoven as a Black Composer

    The South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) published a short story collection in 2007 entitled Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. The title story is about a multiracial university professor in Johannesburg, thinking back over his life and his identity: Beethoven was one-sixteenth black the presenter of a classical music programme on the radio…

  • Juba

    If you’ve seen the film 12 Years A Slave, you may remember that Solomon Northup (shown in a sketch above), whose memoir was the basis for the movie, was a musician. Northup wrote of his life as a free black violinist in New York State: In the winter season I had numerous calls to play on…

  • Authenticity, part III: White Tears

    As you know by now, White Tears is the story (among other things!) of Seth, a young, white, college-educated sound engineer, who accidentally records a line from an old blues song while picking up ambient sounds in Washington Square Park. His business partner Carter, the scion of a wealthy family whose riches come from running…

  • Traditional African Music and Cross-Cultural Encounters

    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.” We know about certain west African dances, like the Pandulungu, Guandu, or…

  • Call and Response

    Call-and-response form is a structure imported to the Americas by enslaved African people in the seventeenth century. A brief history: A prison work song: (“Hammer, Ring,” Jesse Bradley and group, State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas, 1930s) A spiritual: “Talking ‘Bout a Good Time” (Moving Star Hall Singers, 1967) A sharecroppers’ work song: (“Arwhoolie,” Thomas J. Marshall,…