Africa and the Blues (review)

Africa and the Blues, by Gerhard Kubik. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1999. xviii + 240 pp.

For decades, scholars in African American studies have been obsessed with the blues, more often than not construing it in the broadest possible terms as nothing less than the values and motives underlying Afro-American culture and literature. Thus it is something of a shock, but ultimately a relief, to encounter Gerhard Kubik's new book, which focuses narrowly but with great precision on the African origins of the blues as a musical/poetic genre.

Ethnomusicologists know Kubik as a distinguished specialist in African music, an indefatigable field researcher, and the author of dozens of articles and monographs. His work is careful and methodical, grounded in empirical observation and skeptical of "the pleasures of freewheeling thought associations" (21-22). Africa and the Blues, a masterful synthesis of a vast but fragmented body of evidence, is no exception. It offers a concise and persuasive hypothesis for how a few musical traditions from what he terms the "West Central Sudanic Belt" (roughly from Mali to central Cameroon) may have contributed to the blues.

In focusing on the savannah country, Kubik is extending and refining an argument first offered some thirty years ago by blues researcher Paul Oliver. Kubik confirms that the blues, which features none of the multilayered polyrhythm and asymmetric time-line patterns characteristic of the drum ensembles of the coasts of West and Central Africa, could not have come from that region. More surprisingly, he also rules out the rich musical traditions of Senegambia on the grounds that the scale types and patterns of harmonization in that region are "difficult to correlate with the blues" (70). Instead, Kubik suggests that the blues arose from a synthesis of two different traditions: an "Arabic/Islamic" strain, with professional musicians singing in a plaintive, melismatic, and declamatory style while accompanying themselves on stringed instruments; and an older, "ancient Nigritic" style performed by agricultural workers and characterized by simple pentatonic melodies and "swinging" off-beat accents. In Africa, these traditions remain distinct, as Kubik, noted in his field research in northeast Nigeria and Cameroon in the 1960s. Some time in the late-nineteenth-century United States, presumably, they merged to form a new genre ideally adapted to the needs and sensibilities of transplanted Africans.

Crucial to Kubik's research is the assumption that genealogy and culture are separable. In other words, a majority of slaves need not derive their ancestry from a given region for that region's cultural practices to become dominant. This frees Kubik to consider cultural connections that otherwise might seem improbable. Among his theories is that the prevalence of one-stringed musical bows (sometimes called "diddley-bows") in the rural South can be traced to similar practices in Mozambique, which contributed a small but documentable percentage of slaves to North America.

Those unfamiliar with music notation may find many details in this short but densely argued volume difficult to decipher. Many of the points would undoubtedly be more vivid were the book to be accompanied by a CD of musical examples--which, alas, is not the case. The recordings referred to are quite obscure, and many of them exist only in sound archives. One can only hope that some enterprising company will se ize the opportunity to provide a broader public with documentation on the "roots of the blues."

--Scott DeVeaux

Scott DeVeaux, who teaches at the University of Virginia, has written on bebop and is series editor for the Oxford University Press Readers on American Musicians.

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