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| African blues | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Music of Africa Music of West Africa variousblues styles |
| Cultural origins | Africablues styles |
| Typical instruments | Ngoni,guitar,Kora,Calabash,Djembe,Balafon, |
| Derivative forms | Rock and roll,R&B,swing |
African blues is a genre ofpopular music, primarily fromWest Africa. The term may also reference a putative journey undertaken by traditionalAfrican music from its homeland to theUnited States and back.[1] Some[which?] scholars andethnomusicologists have speculated that theorigins of theblues can be traced to the musical traditions of Africa, as retained byAfrican-Americans during and afterslavery.[2] Even though the blues is a key component ofAmerican popular music, its rural, African-American origins are largely undocumented, and its stylistic links with African instrumental traditions are somewhat tenuous.[3] One musical influence that can be traced back to African sources is that of the plantationwork songs with theircall-and-response format, and more especially the relatively free-formfield hollers of the latersharecroppers, which seem to have been directly responsible for the characteristic vocal style of the blues.[3]
Albums such asAfrican Blues by Ali Farka Toure have a noticeableAfrican and American Blues influence.[clarify] The death ofMalian guitar legendAli Farka Touré has inspired a new round of speculation about the roots of the blues in Africa. Touré famously argued that the beloved American genre was "nothing but African", a bold assertion. The question has received extensive scholarly attention inGerhard Kubik's bookAfrica and the Blues, and inPaul Oliver'sSavannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues.[2]
From obscure and largely undocumented rural American origins, it became the most extensively recorded of all traditional music types... Since the early 1960s blues has been the most important single influence on the development of Western popular music... In its early years the blues was wholly African American... Influential in its development were the collective unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture, which followed a responsorial 'leader-and-chorus' form that can be traced not only to pre-Civil War origins but to African sources. Responsorial work-songs diminished when the plantations were broken up, but persisted in the southern penitentiary farms until the 1950s. After the Reconstruction era, black workers either engaged in seasonal collective labour in the South or tended smallholdings leased to them under the system of debt-serfdom known as sharecropping. Work-songs therefore increasingly took the form of solo calls or 'hollers', comparatively free in form but close to blues in feeling. The vocal style of the blues probably derived from the holler... Blues instrumental style shows tenuous links with African music. Drumming was forbidden on slave plantations, but the playing of string instruments was often permitted and even encouraged, so the musicians among slaves from the savanna regions, with their strong traditions of string playing, predominated. Thejelli, orgriots – professional musicians who also acted as their tribe's historians and social commentators – performed roles not unlike those of the later blues singers, while thebanjo is thought to be a direct descendant of theirbanza orxalam.(subscription required)
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