Folk Music and Modern Sound

Black Music: Its Roots, Its Popularity, Its Commercial Prostitution

Black Music: Its Roots, Its Popularity, Its Commercial Prostitution AmiriBaraka MOST PEOPLE, by now, except for the very young, the willfully or conditionally ignorant, or racists, know the origins of two important American musics, blues and jazz. They are, historically and originally black musics, or part of AfroAmerican musical tradition. They are also, and fewer might understand this, the major framework in which the majority of popular and "serious" American music has emerged. (I make the distinction popular and serious only to take into consideration the narrowmindedness of academics, bathed as they are in such essentially elitist false distinctions!) The roots of black music are, of course, the African people and their tradition, especially as they came to be reshaped by the slave trade and American slavery. And as these peoples and their various national traditions (because they came to America as various nationalities, what you call tribes), came to exist in the New World, especially the United States, where finally these many groups came to be transformed into one new nationality, the African-American, by the nineteenth century. Blues carries with it Africa and Afro-America, shaped in a land of white domination. It carries slavery and degradation, and both the memory of Africa, and the reality of the African-American developing a further variation of African 177 178 B L A C K S AND B L U E S culture, like Afro-American life itself, is an amalgam of African as well as European (English, Spanish, French) and Native American elements. America itself is this as well. But as Bruce Franklin, author of The Victim as Criminal and Artist, said in a recent MinnesotaReview,u The most distinctive feature of United States history is Afro-American slavery and its consequences. This truth is at the heart of our political , economic and social experience as a nation-state. It is also at the heart of our cultural experience, and therefore the slave narrative,** (for instance) **is not peripheral but central to American culture."1 The centrality of the black experience to shaping American culture is not understood, like when chocolate syrup is dropped into milk, it does undergo some serious change, but look at the milk! What is represented as "official" American culture by the rulers and their messengers is one thing, but the actuality of American culture is quite another. So that American literature in its official university version ismainly writing by a few white men, but to speak in reality of American literature means that it must "include the literature of several peoples, including the Afro-American nation," to quote Franklin again. I know I shock no one by saying that it is normal ruling class procedure to portray American culture as suffocatingly white, but it is also not completely unusual to find even Afro-American culture depicted as crude black versions of something Euro-Americans do with a great deal more significance and profundity! People who will tell you that they are normally intelligent seem put upon or embarrassed or at a loss to talk about blues and jazz as they fundamentally exist, i. e., as vectors of AfroAmerican culture. The fact that there are white blues and whites playing jazz simply demonstrates the strength of the music, and what should be meant by the term American culture . But there is nothing strange about the chief practitioners of this music being black. Just as no one is made uptight Black Music: Roots, Popularity, Commercial Prostitution 179 by the fact that most practitioners, or at least the chief practitioners , of European concert music are Europeans (except perhaps officials of Civil Rights organizations sponsored by Standard Oil and Carnegie). In Blues People2 I tried to express afundamental perception of mine and many other people that the music changes when the people change—it develops as the people develop, and reflects that development and the twists and turns of those lives that create it. Black music moves from African to African with some foreign elements (English, Spanish, French, Native American), becomes work songs, becomes more "Americanized." It becomes Afro-Christian, at one point, and develops spirituals. And the secular, the nonreligious develops as well, sung tales, poems, the hollers, shouts, arhoolies that are the parents and later form of developed blues. The blues is a simple verse form put to music, the music simple, reflecting the level of productive forces of the slave and ex-slave...