Music history books are often silent on the topic of African music in the land that would eventually become the United States. Historians like evidence, after all, and although the scholars regularly acknowledge the significance of African music, there has always been a good deal of guesswork involved in sketching the history of an abused population. Without recorded sound, oral tradition and written notation are the two chief methods of preserving cultural history. Oral tradition has proved fragmentary due to the many abuses of slavery, and written notation of African American music barely exists before emancipation.
Therefore, American music history, like broader American history, suffers from a gaping hole where it ought to have a multitude of stories. Scholars have written massive biographies of George Frideric Handel, a musician whose life was untouched by war or famine and who actively invested in the African slave trade; but it’s not possible to do the same for any of his African contemporaries who survived the Middle Passage and lived out their days in bondage. The lack of evidence means that we can only sketch something that we should be able to understand fully. And yet, among the fragments, there is much to learn from and admire.
We have no direct evidence of the survival of West African classical musics in the colonial United States. By classical music, of course, I mean music that involves a historic tradition, highly trained professional musicians, elite patronage, and a body of musical knowledge that the musicians must master.[1] And by this standard, the music of the griots, the professional class of West African musicians who sang the praises of kings and told historical stories through songs, certainly qualifies as classical music.
Sadly, however, the griots’ music has not been documented in the New World. Their music varied between different African cultures; Americans have spent the most time studying the music of the Mande people, whose jalolu still preserve in song the epic story of the great king Sundiata Keita of Mali (d. 1255). This is not a written music, but is passed down between family members. And while it’s possible that some professional musicians survived crossing the ocean, the social networks that enabled the survival of an oral tradition were routinely disrupted in America by the relocation of enslaved people. This is probably the greatest reason that African epic poetry and its accompanying music did not survive long enough to be documented in North America.
Another difficulty in re-creating West African classical musics in America had to do with instruments. The Mande jalolu played a variety of instruments, including the kora, a harp with twenty-one strings, on which they improvised elaborate polyphony; the ngoni, a guitar-like instrument that you can still hear on recordings by the great Malian singer Ali Farka Touré; and the balafon, an instrument related to modern xylophones. In the lands that now comprise modern Senegal, there are also accounts of professional musicians (géwël) who told stories while playing drums.
African musicians who found themselves in colonial North America had to reconstruct their instruments from memory, based on the materials they had at hand, in their limited free time. And instead of the instruments played by professional musicians, they often made an instrument that we now know as the banjo. This instrument bears a striking resemblance to the Senegambian akonting, and is even played in a similar manner. The akonting, however, was an instrument that professional musicians rarely played in West African societies; it seems to have been more associated with ordinary people and amateur musicians. Thus early American scholars, in seeking the origins of the banjo, tended to see it as a uniquely American variant of the griots’ ngoni; these early narratives thus acknowledged vague African roots while still taking pride in its unique “American” qualities. Daniel Jatta, a Senegalese scholar who drew attention to the akonting connection, was at first treated poorly by American academics; now his ideas enjoy general acceptance.
There are enough surviving references to drumming to suggest that it survived in the Americas. Surviving written accounts from spectators describe drumming at African festivals, such as Pinkster (Pentacost) in colonial New York, Election Day, and Jonkonnu. Most notably, the Place Congo in New Orleans was the site of weekly gatherings of enslaved Africans: the evidence suggests that the dances were at their height from 1786 to 1818, and may have lasted through the 1840s. The surviving accounts, while fragmentary, describe the presence of both dancers and musicians, including drummers, apparently organized by tribal affiliation.
Drumming also features prominently in accounts of revolts, such as the Stono Rebellion of 1739. The following year, the colonial government of South Carolina banned the use of loud instruments, such as drums, for fear of their use as signaling devices. The attempt to suppress African musical practices when they could be used as tools of resistance is striking. Even in Albany, New York, Pinkster celebrations were banned in 1811, while the dances in the Place Congo seem to have been suppressed by the 1850s.
You might have noticed that most of the evidence we have centers on instruments—physical objects which can be studied. African people sang as well—indeed it seems very likely that the “blue” notes we hear in jazz and blues originated in African singing styles.[2] African American singing styles have been poorly served by Western staff notation. One of the first serious efforts to transcribe a large body of African American song into notation was Slave Songs of the United States (1867); its editors admitted the basic inadequacy of their notation to describe the microtonal efforts with which these songs were sung.
The fragmentary nature of this evidence means that historians have often had to pour cold water on stories that have regularly caught the popular imagination. One rumor—that the dances at Place Congo lasted into the 1880s and are directly linked to the birth of jazz—has been particularly persistent, partly because it would be wonderful it were somehow true.[3] Another story—that all African drumming was uniformly banned across colonial North America and the early United States—is believable because it represents what the plantation owners probably wanted, even though it was impossible to enforce everywhere.
Finally, a half-truth—the concept of “African rhythm”—remains popular today. Certainly West African traditions are often rhythmically interesting, but emphasizing this aspect of music over all others reduces the music to a rhythmic, bodily activity—a stereotype of African musicality that has long been appealing to white Westerners. Some African languages, such as Ewe (an important language in Ghana) do not even have a word for rhythm; as the African musicologist Kofi Agawu notes, the conversation about African rhythm has largely been shaped in terms that make sense to Western audiences.[4] Thus, when we seek traces of African heritage in contemporary musical culture, we need to be careful not to essentialize the past.
[1] This definition is derived from Michael Church’s stimulating book, The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions (Boydell Press, 2015).
[2] See Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s Music on the Move, p. 71–80, which summarizes research on the connection between blues and West African musics.
[3] Henry A. Kmen, “The Roots of Jazz and the Dance in Place Congo: A Re-Appraisal,” Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical 8 (1972), 5 – 16.
[4] Kofi Agawu, “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 no. 3 (1995), 380–395.
Matthew Franke's Music History Course Notes 