Cultural Officer Cam

First published 16th July 2023 on the Sugarfoot Stomp Facebook Community Group.

Hey everyone! This is my third post of my thoughts on a fascinating book I've been reading: "The Power of Black Music" by Samuel Floyd. Last week, I described how African religion was primarily practised - in the ring ritual. We also explored how this relates to the nature of African rhythm and dance. This week, we follow the ring ritual in its journey through slavery into the new world, creating the early African American song forms of spirituals and secular songs.

This will be a bit of a long post, because it dives into the central argument of the book: The power of black music comes black musicians, singers and dancers maintaining cultural memory of Africa by striving for the “heterophonic sound ideal” of the ring in different contexts throughout American history, creating gospel, blues, ragtime and jazz.

Spirituals

“In the circumstance of slavery, the spiritual was the transplanted African’s primary means of expressing their current struggles and fulfillments while maintaining contact with the traditions and meanings of the past”

The book argues that christian church gatherings were one of the only allowed social gatherings for slaves. Black America took the opportunity to synthesise African religion with catholicism, replacing Opolumare with God, the spirits of ritual possession with Christ, and the lesser gods with saints. Aside from changing the names, the slaves’ religion was far more African than Christian. Much of the religious language in spirituals was not literal. “Figures of speech were prominent and important, for in their use of simile, metaphor and personification, the spirituals were also imbued with a surreptitiously rebellious spirit that reflected the militant refusal of large numbers of slaves to cooperate with the practice of slavery.” The book emphasises freedom from slavery as the central theme of spirituals, not religion as it seems at first.

Common Aspects of Black Music

The book defines an extensive list of many characteristics that define the “heterophonic sound ideal” that the spirituals define and other Black American music genres strive to reflect. Let’s listen to two recordings of spirituals. For the first one, I’ll discuss the melodic and timbral characteristics of the spirituals, and for the second one I’ll discuss the rhythmic and textual aspects.

First, let’s check out Trouble of the World - Dennis Wiley.

1. Melodic

• Pendular thirds (oscillating between the tonic and neutral third of the scale)

  • Listen to how he sings “will be done” at the very start of the song.

• Melisma (melodies sung within one syllable)

• Trailing phrase endings

• Microtonal inflections in a pentatonic context

2. Timbral (From 39:55 onwards, when he starts doing more interesting timbral variation)

• Variously sandy, (“I want to see king Jesus”), piercing, falsetto (“to live with my god”), rough (“with the troubles of this world”), and spoken.

• Non-textual hums, moans, ululations (long, high-pitched trilling sound), and vocables (such as “oh yeah”, “mm hmm”)

Next let’s listen to I See the Sign - McIntosh County Shouters.

3. Rhythmic

• Hand clapping, foot patting, and patting juba (bodily drumming)

• Repetition of short rhythmic motifs

• Cross-rhythms

  • The pole is beating a tresillo rhythm, and the clappers are adding more complex rhythmic layers

• Accented second beats

  • Some of the clappers are clapping beats 2 and 4

• Elision (the practice of shortening and removing English words in an African style to make lines more rhythmic)

  • “Tell who’s gon’ ride him” has one word per beat, whereas “Tell me who is going to ride him” does not

4. Textual

• Tales, ballads, stories, and toasts told in metaphor

  • Like many spirituals, the song uses the toast of judgement day as a metaphor for slave rebellion

• Figures of speech, indirection, implication, and personification in the form of dialect and call and response

  • The caller acts out the dialect “I see the sign,” “sign of the judgement,” “loose horse in the valley,” “tell who’s gon’ ride him,” and so on, telling the toast through indirection while the responders sing “hey lord, time draws nigh” to signify this is supposed to happen soon

• Short phrases that repeat and form larger melodic structures

  • the dialect and call and response pattern overlap to form an awesome, energetic, hopeful performance

Also, notice how much less Christian and more rebellious the spirituals appear in their proper ritual context. “Too often the spirituals are studied apart from their natural, ceremonial context.” The ring-shout ritual as a whole is clearly the African ring ritual recreated for a new context. “The spiritual was created by American slaves as they participated in the process that Christianized them and as they performed their ring rituals, striving to retain their African cultural memory.”

Over the next few weeks, I will describe how these traits manifest themselves in gospel, ragtime, jazz and especially blues.

Secular Song

The book really emphasises the central importance of the spirituals, but it also describes early African American secular song. The main context where secular song was still allowed was the work song. “In Africa, men and women sang as they worked… early on, slave masters noticed that their slaves worked harder when they worked.” Alongside spirituals work songs, there were also children’s songs, which helped preserve the African cultural memory cross the generations, and field cries, which were used for personal expression and communication.

Spirituals and each kind of secular song all shared the characteristics I explained above. However, secular songs were rebellious in a different way. They were often animal trickster tales. “Anasi the spider, Rabbit, Monkey, Fox and the other African animal tricksters were brought with Africans to the New World and, reincarnated in a similar or identical form, they become central to the new tales the African Americans were telling.” The trickster became less evil and more heroic - a symbol of resistance that “constituted a sneak attack on the values of dominant white culture, undermining its power.” The trickster god Esu was also reincarnated as “Legba or the Devil, guardian of the crossroads, who frequented crossroads in search of souls for which to trade”

Key Takeaways

So what can modern swing and blues dancers learn from the “heterophonic sound ideal?” Well, as we will continue to see over the next few posts, we will see that swing and blues music comes from black artists striving to maintain their connection to their African heritage by striving towards the heterophonic sound ideal in different contexts. The same is true for Black American dance forms, which fit the music so well in part because they both come from the same cultural memory of the ring ritual.

Next week, we’ll see how spirituals evolved into gospel and blues music, and how the African “party of the gods” ritual was reincarnated in jookin’ blues dance, laying the foundation for the creation of jazz dance shortly afterwards.

Cam