African American Music

I

Introduction

African American Music, musical history of African Americans, a cultural record that spans over 400 years. Created largely within a social and historical context, the African American musical repertory encompasses a broad range of forms and styles that reflect the cultural heritage and diverse interests of black artists and musicians.

II

The Colonial Era

Africans were first brought to North America in 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia, as indentured servants to white English settlers. As more were forcibly brought over, colonial legislators began to pass laws in the 1660s changing the legal status of Africans from “indentured servants” to “slaves” based on whether the mother was a slave or freeborn. Although stripped of their languages, family bonds, and possessions, the black immigrants brought memories of the rich cultural traditions of Africa, as evidenced by their festivals, ceremonies, and religious observances in colonial America. Central to these practices were African-style call-and-response singing featuring a lead singer and chorus, acrobatic dancing, and polyrhythmic drumming (simultaneously combining multiple layers of independent rhythms).

During the 17th and 18th centuries Anglo-American clergy attempted to convert African slaves to Christianity, teaching them to read the Bible as well as sing psalms and hymns. Christian slaves initially worshipped in colonial churches with their masters in segregated pews or the gallery. The slaves adopted the practice of singing unaccompanied psalms and hymns in a lined-out fashion, in which a leader intoned a line of a song and the congregation repeated the line slowly in call-and-response dialogue. Slaves brought an African sensibility to this style (variously called “Dr. Watts,” after English theologian Isaac Watts, or Baptist “lining hymns”) and transformed the songs into what is now known as black hymnody (African American hymns). White congregations abandoned lining-out psalms and hymns around the 1780s, but black Christians retained the practice, which is still used in some black churches today.

A

Revolutionary War to the Civil War

The American Revolution (1775-1783) coincided with the rise of independent black congregations in the North, where slavery would be largely abolished by the 1830s, and slave congregations in the South, where blacks would not be freed until the end of the American Civil War (1861-1865). These congregations gave rise to a new type of sacred song, later called the Negro spiritual, around the turn of the 19th century. Spirituals were originally sung at informal worship or prayer meetings rather than formal services. The historian John Fanning Watson described the songs in Methodist Error (1819), a monograph that criticized the religious practices of local black Methodists:

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We have too, a growing evil, in the practice of singing in our places of public and society worship, merry airs, adopted from old songs, to hymns of our composing: often miserable as poetry, and senseless as matter . . . and most frequently composed and first sung by the illiterate blacks of the society. . . . In the blacks’ quarter, the coloured people get together, and sing for hours together, short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers, lengthened out with long repetition choruses. These are all sung in the merry chorus-manner of the southern harvest field, or husking-frolic method, of the slave black; …

With every word so sung, they have a sinking of one or other leg of the body alternatively; producing an audible sound of the feet at every step, and as manifest as the steps of actual Negro dancing in Virginia. . .

The antebellum (pre-Civil War) era witnessed greater diversity in the musical life of African Americans. As Northern blacks forged their own cohesive communities they also turned to intellectual and cultural pursuits, particularly in the area of classical music. The first flowering of black concert musicians and classically trained composers dates from this period, including Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the first African American singer to achieve success on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; tenor Thomas Bowers; and composers Frank Johnson, James Hemmenway, William Appo, Aaron J. R. Connor, and Henry F. Williams. These composers wrote primarily ballad songs, marches, and dance music, including cotillions, quadrilles, polkas, and waltzes.

Slaves in the antebellum South generated a large repertory of folk music, particularly spirituals, work songs, field hollers, street cries, dance songs, lullabies, and love songs, as well as instrumental music that was syncopated (stressing notes on the normally weak beat). They generally improvised the music in accordance with oral tradition, designing the songs for communal call-and-response singing. Spirituals were composed as chorus-verse structures, containing internal repetitions of lines of text and music. They were sung unaccompanied, as were work songs, field hollers, and cries. Instrumental music (generally comprising the banjo, flute, bones, and fiddle or violin) accompanied plantation dances such as cotillions, breakdowns, hoedowns, and cakewalks—and corn-shucking festivities.

III

During the Civil War

The American Civil War erupted between the Union and Confederacy in April 1861 when the Confederates fired upon federal forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Both sides used black labor to support their war efforts. The Confederates used slaves, for example, as manual laborers and employed them as fifers and drummers for military regiments. As the Northern army invaded the South, thousands of slaves escaped to Union lines. The escaped slaves were declared contraband of war and were used as workers in camps close to Union forces. In these camps the former slaves retained their religious practices and sang plantation songs, which were often collected and later published by sympathetic Union Army officers and missionaries.

Although blacks could not enlist as soldiers in the Union Army until 1863, historian John Hope Franklin has estimated that more than 186,000 black men joined the conflict by the end of the Civil War. Black soldiers also brought music into the Union camps. A few served as regimental bandsmen. Others sang hymns and black folk songs, particularly spirituals and work songs, as well as popular war songs written by white composers. Black soldiers also had at least one of their own war songs, according to General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a white Union Army commander:

While recruiting and drilling the 9th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops at Benedict, Maryland, in the winter of 1863-1864, the men gathered around the camp-fire would sing by the hour the melodies of the slave plantation slave life they had just left—not very melodious; but one evening I was startled by a magnificent chorus from nearly a thousand black soldiers that called me from my tent to listen to its most inspiring strains, and I caught the words, which I called the “Negro Battle Hymn.”