The Development of Afro-American Music

In Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Baraka takes his readers back to the 17^th and 18^th centuries when African slaves lived under constrained social conditions in the United States. Slaves were prohibited from practicing their religions and from listening to their music because their culture was considered diabolic and evil by white Americans. According to Baraka though, these social conditions are what led to the development of Afro-American music because it forced slaves to make changes to their African culture. For example, since slaves knew they could no longer worship in their old ways, they saw the religion of Christianity as their only way to worship God. In addition, their forced labor changed the way African slaves viewed life and it caused them to start singing work songs influenced by the American culture that surrounded them. Due to these changes in their lifestyle, African culture started to intertwine with the American culture and thereby creating Afro-American music.        

            Baraka claims that African music survived in American Negro music because of African slaves’ use of improvisation. Although they were also prohibited from using drums, Africans looked for other instruments to use such as empty oil drums. The rhythm in Afro-American music can be traced back to Africans’ use of drums for communication. Baraka states, “Also, the elaborately develop harmonic system used in the playing of percussion instruments, i.e.,the use of drums or other percussion instruments of different timbres to produce harmonic contrasts, was not immediately recognizable to the Western ear…”(26). Africans had a unique way of playing percussion instruments that white Americans had never heard before. For Africans, rhythm and a song’s lyrical meaning were important aspects of their music. Therefore, they even changed their music to adapt to their new religion of Christianity. They made Christianity into an emotional religion that consisted of more melodic music and singing. They believed that God should be praised by happy singing and dancing. Baraka says, “The lyrics, rhythms, and even the harmonies were essentially of African derivation, subjected, of course, to the transformations that American life had brought into existence. The Negro’s religious music was his original creation and the spirituals themselves were probably the first completely native American music the slaves made” (42). Africans in the United States had to leave some aspects of their African culture due to the racism and discrimination that existed in the slavery time period and post slavery time period. But this did not mean the end of their culture; instead they found ways to incorporate American culture into their culture and created music that within time would develop into blues and jazz. Baraka ends chapter six saying, “And it was this boundary, this no man’s land, that provided the logic and beauty of his music” (80). This sentence I believe sums up Baraka’s thesis because he is telling his readers that the racial boundary that once existed between whites and blacks is what caused their collision of cultures and the rise of beautiful music that represents part of America’s colonial history.