Southern Musical Tradition and the African Tradition Essay -- Music Mu

Southern Musical Tradition and the African Tradition The second major tributary of the southern musical tradition comes from the African continent and is the heritage import of the five million slaves brought to North America against their will to provide the bulk of the labor in the pre-industrial agrarian south. Contemporary blues, while not exclusively black music by any means, remains largely black in terms of its leading performers and, to a lesser extent, its listening audience. The forerunner of the modern urban blues was, however, almost exclusively black and was completely southern and rural. It was, and is, a music born out of the experience of slavery and Jim Crow segregation with their attendant poverty, alienation and suppression. As a musical genre, this remarkable and durable expression has an enormous relevance for the historical development of southern music in general and the southern black experience in particular. Modern blues evolved out of the southern "country blues" and became an urban phenomenon in the same social, economic and demographic processes which urbanized black Americans during the two or three decades prior to World War II. Thus, an examination of the black country blues provides a potentially fruitful vehicle for the study of southern rural culture viz a viz the black experience. At the very least, it provides a means for assessing the perceptions of southern culture which were held and articulated by a sensitive group of observers -- the bluesmen and blueswomen of the rural south. The extent to which their music was received, popularized and appreciated by their audience provides a broader look at the hopes and drea... ...cal development, display similar structural and thematic content and have, since the 1960s, begun to recognize and celebrate these commonalities. Works Cited: Chapple, Steve and Reebee Garofalo. Rock and Roll is Here to Pay. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1977. Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1968. Morthland, John. The Best of Country Music. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. Oliver, Paul. Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues. London: November Books, Limited, 1970. Smith, M.G. "Social and Cultural Pluralism," in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 83 (January, 1957):763-777. Van den Berghe, Pierre. Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective, 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, 1978.