The drums were even banned in the British Caribbean. Scholars have often noted the hidden meaning of field hollers and the significance of the drums to communication between various slave groups. These instances of black music-making were largely produced by and for a black slave community that understood the significance of the music in ways that whites never could. On the one hand there were the plaintive call-and-response hollers and ’sperchils‘ to be found in the tobacco fields, cotton plantations, and sugar marshes that stretched from Virginia to Texas. Perhaps the difference between ‚downtown‘ and ‚uptown‘ black style even began during this era. That is to say, depending on the region and the demands of the musical audience–whether it be fellow slaves or plantation-owners–the music varied from place to place. This is an important thing to remember, especially if you hold with Amiri Baraka that „Blues People“ have always been curiously American „Negroes.“īut the North American variation and reinvention of African tradition in the early nineteenth-century was not monolithic. After 1808, blacks in North America began remembering–as well as forgetting–African musical traditions, reinventing them to fit their needs in an entirely different American context. Unlike in Brazil or Cuba direct African infusions into black American culture were much less pronounced in the early and middle nineteenth-century. The creole birthrate actually climbed in the United States, as opposed to most Latin and Caribbean American colonies. Historically, and for various complicated reasons, slaves in the United States began reproducing their numbers after the closing of the African slave trade in 1808. a population of blacks born not in Africa but in America. There had to be a creole population in place, i.e. There was one condition that had to be met for a black tradition unique to North America to develop. For instance, the era American historians call „antebellum“ (roughly 1815-1861) holds much of interest to researchers looking for the deep roots of jazz. Call and response, improvisation, the appropriation and reinvention of elements from Western art music: black music in the twentieth-century has never held a monopoly on these musical practices. Though jazz and classic blues are really early twentieth-century black music innovations, certain characteristics found in jazz do have their roots in much earlier musical traditions.
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