Endangered African American Musical Instruments

[jamie]

[jamie]

Most African Americans reside in the black belt region(where I grew up) in the south and that's where you are more likely to find this kind of stuff but it's a needle in a hay stack depending on what it is.

According to the 2000 Census, New York City has the largest population of self-defined black residents of any U.S. city, with over 2 million within the city's boundaries ....

...New York City has the largest population of black immigrants (at 686,814) and descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean (especially from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, Belize, Grenada, and Haiti), and of sub-Saharan Africans...

There are two million Africans(of all backgrounds) in NYC and around 40 million in the US(mostly in the black belt region). I believe that's one reason why some people never see this kind of stuff. They come to the states and move to one of the most expensive cities in the country with a population of African Americans representative of only a tiny chunk of the total. That's like moving to Cape Verde(nice looking place BTW) and thinking you have an idea of all of West Africa.





(Here is one of the endangered instruments the guy mentioned in the above video)









Before all the white people came in to money off of the family picnic back in the 1970's

[jamie]

[jamie]

African roots of the blues series(Videos are below)
Note: (this is something people tend to mis) the point isn't to show a direct repository of music traditions from Africa to the U.S. The point is to understand what building blocks were made from the deconstruction of those African music traditions. The best way to depict that is to show you Music traditions before deconstruction. That way you can mentally break them down and see what building blocks were used in African American music. Too often people make quick comments like "They took our culture" "African Americans lost their culture" etc etc. In the process they miss the bigger picture. Work songs, spirituals, blues, jazz, techno, hip-hop, etc. didn't come from Europe. Certain filters(instruments) did but most of the substance that ran through those filters didn't.

I get tired of the simple minded one to one propositions, like if a person isn't playing a talking drum and "cowbell" they've lost there African-ness or some such nonsense. In a purely generic perspective the development African American music and continual progressions show how to do away with the similarly simple minded proposition of ether "westernize" or maintain traditions like it's an either or proposition.

Quick & simple Generics Lesson

Code: Select all

 
Concrete example:
(4*Sqrt(4)^2)/4=4

Now take out the 4 and turn it to a common set variable.  It's now in a generic form.

Generic example
(x*Sqrt(x)^2)/x=x

Why would I take out the 4 when the example specifically deals with what happens when 4 is proccessed?
Because the generic form is true irrespective of what you put in the place of the variable.

1. (8*Sqrt(8 )^2)/8=8 ;  2. (56*Sqrt(56)^2)/56=56 ;  3. (3000*Sqrt(3000)^2)/3000=3000

Like wise I could go even crazier..
(my body mass*Sqrt(my body mass)^2)/my body mass=my body mass
or even...
(forum posters*Sqrt(forum posters)^2)/forum posters=forum posters

I.E the generic form (x*Sqrt(x)^2)/x=x is correct irrespective of what you put in the place of the variable.
The development of African American music is a "concrete example" that if properly "generic'd" could serve as a guide on many issues in regard to the modernization of African systems as opposed to merely copying Europeans or Asians.


Take the basic village and deconstruct it, you have cloth/garment making/dyeing, building construction, iron working, food production, etc. you don't have to change those basic building blocks just send them through more efficient filters(industrial grade agriculture, metal, and sowing tools) ...now powering those tools is a different story but anyway... in a nut shell that is the story of African American music. Which is literally an African solution to an African problem and that solution gave and gives something completely unique to the world short of straight copying other peoples institutions and regurgitating them on the people.(Which in my opinion is simply cultural terraforming)
.
Those music building blocks before deconstruction and new filters, enjoy!




Back in the U.S Mississippi delta region

Back in Ghana?



Now if you can mentally deconstruct the music above into components and understand how they were filtered through different tools and reconstructed into new but still uniquely African Music forms that didn't stagnate but diversified and led the way over time then you can do that same deconstruction with the village depicted below. Take the Music example, turn it into a generic development equation by taking out music then plug in different aspects of life depicted below.

Why? How would that work? "Because the generic form is true irrespective of what you put in the place of the variable."
Concrete form:



1.Now what does that village look like in component form?
2.How would I go bout plugging those components into a GenericDevelopmentEquation such as the development of African American music?
3.(mentally)What would a 10 year projection of that application/"plugging in" look like?


Wow I had no intention of making this long as post. My thoughts got the better of me (snaps finger)

[jamie]

Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta is a Jola scholar and musician from Mandinary, Gambia, who pioneered the research and documentation of the akonting, a Jola folk lute, as well as the related Manjago folk lute, the buchundu, in the mid-1980s. Prior to Jatta's work, these instruments were largely unknown outside the rural villages of the Senegambia region of West Africa.

Contribution to knowledge of West African music
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In the 1960s, scholars and writers began to seriously examine the traditional music of West Africa in their search for the roots of the blues, jazz, and the other music forms that had emerged in the African diaspora. However, in this quest there was very little study and documentation of West African stringed instruments done other than in the overall context of general musical and cultural traditions. For the most part, the only stringed instruments to receive specific attention were those of the griots, such as their plucked lutes (e.g. the Mande ngoni, the Wolof xalam, the Fula hoddu, the Soninke gambare, and the kora (the 21-string harp-lute of the Mandinka griots).

Griots are male members of hereditary music and word artisan castes found in certain West African Islamized peoples with similar tripartie caste systems. The griot phenomenon is limited to the various peoples of the Mande language family - some 53 related ethnic groups, such as the Bamana (or Bambara), Mandinka, Malinke, Susu, Soninke, and so on - as well as the non-Mande Wolof, the western Fulas or Fulani (Fula: Fulɓe; French: Peuls), Songhai (also Songhay), Sereer, Lebu, and Tukulóor.)

In 2000, Jatta presented his research findings and introduced the Jola akonting at the Third Annual Banjo Collectors Gathering, an annual international conference of the foremost collectors and scholars of 19th and early 20th century banjos. The annual Banjo Collectors Gatherings also serve as the principal forums for the presentations of new research on the banjo's history and organology.

Jatta's presentation, in which he performed on the akonting and showed film footage of other Jola musicians playing the instrument, made for quite a sensation. Up until that point, the conventional wisdom was that the wooden-bodied plucked lutes exclusive to the West African griots, such as the Mande ngoni and the Wolof xalam, were the archetypes for the earliest forms of the banjo, first made and played by enslaved West Africans in the New World, from the 17th century on. Jatta's proposition that gourd-bodied non-griot folk and artisan lutes - like the Jola akonting (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau), the Manjago buchundu (Gambia, Guinea-Bissau), the Gwari kaburu (Nigeria), and the Frafra koliko (Ghana), to name but a few - were the more likely candidates was revolutionary.

Since then, many museums around the world have updated their collections to include the akonting and other members of the West African folk/artisan lute family, while banjo historians and ethnomusicologists have begun to broaden the range of their focus to include these instruments as well those used by griots.
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"My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history."

Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it.

Jatta's father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn't think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students.

"When the football ended, there was this music program from Tennessee, and they called it country music," Jatta says. "I watched the program and saw the modern banjo being used. And the sound just sounded like my father's akonting."

That experience put Jatta on a journey to explore the banjo's connections with the instrument he grew up with.

The banjo came to America with the slaves, and musicologists have long looked in West Africa for its predecessors. Much of the speculation has centered on the ngoni and the xalam, two hide-covered stringed instruments from West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. But they're just two of more than 60 similar plucked stringed instruments found in the region.



Jatta plays an akonting tune written by his father.


Over the next two decades, while he pursued undergraduate and graduate degrees in the U.S., Jatta learned everything he could about the origins of the banjo. Eventually, he reached a conclusion.

"Among all the instruments ever mentioned as a prototype of the banjo from the African region," he says, "the akonting to me has more similarities, more objective similarities than any other that has ever been mentioned."

For one thing, the akonting looks like a banjo. It has a long neck that, like those of early banjos, extends through the instrument's gourd body. It has a movable wooden bridge that, as in banjos, holds the strings over the skin head.

But for Jatta and other banjo scholars, most convincing is how the akonting is played. Players use the index finger to strike down on one of the long strings, and the thumb sounds the akonting's short string as the hand moves back upward. When Jatta looked at early banjo instruction books from the mid-1800s, he found that they described an almost identical playing style.

"What struck me was when they mentioned the ball of the thumb and the nail of the index or middle finger, I knew straight away my father was using this same style," Jatta says. "This was never a surprise to me, because I have seen this since I was 5 years old."

That early style of playing predates the three-finger style used today by nearly all bluegrass banjo players. Something similar is still used by folk and country musicians who play in a style sometimes called frailing or clawhammer.

After doing 10 years of research supported by a Swedish university, in 2000, Jatta presented his findings first in Stockholm, and then a few months later at a banjo collectors' convention in Boston. Greg Adams is a banjoist and graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland; he says Jatta's findings on the akonting have forced many scholars to rethink their assumptions about where to look for information on the banjo's ancestors.

"A lot of the emphasis up to that point was focused on griot traditions, which is extremely important as part of the conversation as we look to West Africa," Adams says. "But what the akonting did was open up a new line of discourse."

The ngoni and xalam are instruments typically played by griots — praise singers who enjoy special status in many West African tribes. Adams says the akonting is a folk instrument, played not by griots, but by ordinary people in the Jola tribe.

In terms of which tradition has the most direct connection to the banjo, Adams says it's a mistake to think of it as an either/or proposition: "Each of these traditions deserves to be explored, experienced, examined on their own terms."

Jatta plans to continue his work, documenting the akonting musical tradition and its connections to the banjo and other areas of Jola culture, through a research and education center he's founding back home in Gambia.

[jamie]

After this much we might as well push forward from Africa and the early sources on threw the rest of the U.S. diasporan music


I'm going to move on to the blues:

[jamie]

Ok, now that we've done folk country and blues lets move on to Jazz ........(gospel is next)










Congo Square is an open space within Louis Armstrong Park, which is located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, just across Rampart Street north of the French Quarter. The Tremé neighborhood is famous for its history of African American music.

In Louisiana's French and Spanish colonial era of the 18th century, slaves were commonly allowed Sundays off from their work. They were allowed to gather in the "Place des Nègres", "Place Publique", later "Circus Square" or informally "Place Congo" [2] at the "back of town" (across Rampart Street from the French Quarter), where the slaves would set up a market, sing, dance, and play music.



The tradition continued after the city became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. As African music had been suppressed in the Protestant colonies and states, the weekly gatherings at Congo Square became a famous site for visitors from elsewhere in the U.S. In addition, because of the immigration of refugees (some bringing slaves) from the Haitian Revolution, New Orleans received thousands of additional Africans and Creoles in the early years of 19th century. They reinforced African traditions in the city, in music as in other areas. Many visitors were amazed at the African-style dancing and music. Observers heard the beat of the bamboulas and wail of the banzas, and saw the multitude of African dances that had survived through the years.




Townsfolk would gather around the square on Sunday afternoons to watch the dancing. In 1819, the architect Benjamin Latrobe, a visitor to the city, wrote about the celebrations in his journal. Although he found them "savage",[2] he was amazed at the sight of 500-600 unsupervised slaves who assembled for dancing. He described them as ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts, with fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls, jingling and flirting about the performers' legs and arms. The women, one onlooker reported, wore, each according to her means, the newest fashions in silk, gauze, muslin, and percale dresses. The males covered themselves in oriental and Indian dress and covered themselves only with a sash of the same sort wrapped around the body. Except for that, they went naked.

One witness noted that clusters of onlookers, musicians, and dancers represented tribal groupings, with each nation taking their place in different parts of the square. The musicians used a range of instruments from available cultures: drums, gourds, banjo-like instruments, and quillpipes made from reeds strung together like pan flutes, as well as marimbas and European instruments such as the violin, tambourines, and triangles.

White Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk incorporated rhythms and tunes he heard in Congo Square into some of his compositions, like his famous Bamboula, Op. 2.

As harsher United States practices of slavery replaced the more lenient French colonial style, the slave gatherings declined. Although no recorded date of the last slave dances in the square exists, the practice seems to have stopped more than a decade before the end of slavery with the American Civil War.

In the late 19th century, the square again became a famous musical venue, this time for a series of brass band concerts by orchestras of the area's "Creole of color" community. Toward the end of the century, the city of New Orleans officially renamed the square as "Beauregard Square" in honor of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. While this name appeared on some maps, most locals continued to call it "Congo Square". In 2011, the New Orleans City Council officially voted to restore the traditional name Congo Square.[3]

In the 1920s New Orleans Municipal Auditorium was built in an area just in back of the Square, displacing and disrupting some of the Tremé community.

In the 1960s a controversial urban renewal project leveled a substantial portion of the Tremé neighborhood around the Square. After a decade of debate over the land, the City turned it into Louis Armstrong Park, which incorporates old Congo Square.

Starting in 1970, the City organized the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and held events annually at Congo Square. As attendance grew, the city moved the festival to the much larger New Orleans Fairgrounds. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, Congo Square has continued to be an important venue for music festivals and a community gathering place for brass band parades, protest marches, and drum circles.






Congo Square

[jamie]

Before 1865
Almost all the first Africans who arrived in the New World were enslaved. They came from several regions of Africa.
Their ways of living were described by themselves, in some narratives. They had to work either in plantations or in town.

Slavery was an important issue facing Churches, as the enslaved were allowed to meet for Christian services. Some Christian ministers, such as J. D. Long, wrote against slavery.


Rural enslaved Africans used to stay after the regular worship services, in churches or in plantation “praise houses”, for singing and dancing. But, slaveholders did not allow dancing and playing drums, as usual in Africa. They also had meetings at secret places (“camp meetings”, “bush meetings”), because they needed to meet one another and share their joys, pains and hopes. In rural meetings, thousands of the enslaved were gathered and listened to itinerant preachers, and sang spirituals, for hours. In the late 1700s, they sang the precursors of spirituals, which were called “corn ditties”.



So, in rural areas, spirituals were sung, mainly outside of churches. In cities, about 1850, the Protestant City-Revival Movement created a new song genre, which was popular; for revival meetings organized by this movement, temporary tents were erected in stadiums, where the attendants could sing.

At church, hymns and psalms were sung during services. Some of them were transformed into songs of a typical African American form: they are "Dr Watts”.

The lyrics of negro spirituals were tightly linked with the lives of their authors: enslaved Africans. While work songs dealt only with their daily life, spirituals were inspired by the message of Jesus Christ and his Good News (Gospel) of the Bible, “You can be saved”. They are different from hymns and psalms, because they were a way of sharing the hard condition of being enslaved.

Many enslaved Africans in town and in plantations tried to run to a “free country”, that they called “my home” or “Sweet Canaan, the Promised Land”. This country was on the Northern side of Ohio River, that they called “Jordan”. Some negro spirituals refer to the Underground Railroad, an organization for helping enslaved Africans to run away.



NEGRO SPIRITUALS AND WORK SONGS
During slavery and afterwards, workers were allowed to sing songs during their working time. This was the case when they had to coordinate their efforts for hauling a fallen tree or any heavy load. For example, prisoners used to sing "chain gang" songs, when they worked on the road or some construction. But some "drivers" also allowed the enslaved to sing "quiet" songs, if they were not apparently against slaveholders. Such songs could be sung either by only one or by several enslaved Africans. They were used for expressing personal feeling, and for cheering one another.




NEGRO SPIRITUALS AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
The Underground Railroad (UGRR) helped the enslaved to run to free a country. A fugitive could use several ways. First, they had to walk at night, using hand lights and moonlight. When needed, they walked (“waded”) in water, so that dogs could not smell their tracks. Second, they jumped into chariot, where they could hide and ride away. These chariots stopped at some “stations”, but this word could mean any place where the enslaved had to go for being taken in charge.

So, negro spirituals like “Wade in the Water”, “The Gospel Train” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” directly refer to the UGRR.


Between 1865 and 1925
Slavery was abolished in 1865. Then, some African Americans were allowed to go to school and be graduated. At Fisk University, one of the first universities for African American, in Nashville (Tennessee), some educators decided to raise funds for supporting their institution. So, some educators and students made tours in the New World and in Europe, and sang negro spirituals (Fisk Jubilee Singers). Other Black universities had also singers of negro spirituals: Tuskegee Institute, etc.
Just after 1865, most of African Americans did not want to remember the songs they sung in hard days of slavery. It means that even when ordinary people sang negro spirituals, they were not proud to do so.


In the 1890s, Holiness and Sanctified churches appeared, of which was the Church of God in Christ. In these churches, the influence of African traditions was in evidence. These churches were heirs to shouts, hand clapping, foot-stomping and jubilee songs, like it was in plantation “praise houses”.

At the same time, some composers arranged negro spirituals in a new way, which was similar to the European classical music. Some artists, mainly choruses, went abroad (in Europe and Africa) and sang negro spirituals. At the same time, ministers like Charles A. Tindley, in Philadelphia, and their churches sang exciting church songs that they copyrighted.


Between 1925 and 1985
In the 1920s, the Black Renaissance was an artist movement concerning poetry and music. “It was an evidence of a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart”, explained Alan Locke. So, the use of dialect was taboo, in this movement. The “race-spirit” infused the work of musicians and writers like Langston Hughes. For the first time, African Americans realized that their roots were deep in the land of their birth.
The Black Renaissance had some influence on the way of singing and interpreting negro spirituals. First, the historical meaning of these songs were put forward. Then, singers were pushed to be more educated.

For example, in early Twentieth century, boys used to sing negro spirituals in schoolyards. Their way of singing was not sophisticated. But educators thought that negro spirituals are musical pieces, which must be interpreted as such. New groups were formed, such as the Highway QC’s (QC : Quincy College), and sung harmonized negro spirituals.

This constant improvement of negro spirituals gave birth to another type of Christian songs. These were inspired by the Bible (mainly the Gospel) and related to the daily life. Thomas A. Dorsey was the first who composed such new songs. He called them Gospel songs, but some people say “Dorseys”. He is considered as being the Father of Gospel music.

It is of interest to see that, during this period, African Americans began to leave the South and went North. Then, Gospel songs were more and more popular in Northern towns, like Chicago.



Between 1915 and 1925, many African American singers, like Paul Robeson, performed either at church or on stage, or even in movies, then negro spirituals were considered mainly as traditional songs. In the late 1930s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe dared sing Gospel songs in a nightclub. This was the very start of singing Gospel songs in many kinds of places: churches, theaters, concert halls. The number of quartets was high, at that time.


At the same time, some preachers and their congregations were also famous; some of them recorded negro spirituals and Gospel songs. Ministers, like James Cleveland, made tours with their choruses, in the United States and abroad.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, before and during rallies for Civil Rights, demonstrators sang negro spirituals. For example, “We Shall Overcome” and “This Little Light of Mine” were popular


After 1985
The first Dr Martin Luther King's Day was celebrated in 1985; it became a national holiday in 1992. This event is a milestone in the history of African American: it shows that the African American community is a part of the US nation. This Day is included in the month, when Black History is celebrated through various events.
Since that first King’s Day, Negro spirituals have been considered as being pieces of the American heritage. So, they are often in the programs of events reminding Black History.

It appears that today everyone may perform Gospel music in the United States. The main issue is to know how to improve the African American integrity in singing negro spirituals and other Christian songs.