What is Black Musical

Introduction

Black music is music created, produced, or inspired by black people, people of African descent, including African music traditions and African popular music as well as the music genres of the African diaspora, including Caribbean music, Latin music, Brazilian music and African-American music. These genres include spiritual, gospel, rumba, blues, bomba, rock and roll, rock, jazz, salsa, R&B, samba, calypso, soul, kwaito, cumbia, funk, ska, reggae dub reggae, house, Detroit techno, amapiano, hip hop, pop, gqom, afrobeat, and others.

Many genres of music originate from communities that have visible roots in Africa. In North America, it was a way that the early slaves could express themselves and communicate when they were being forcibly relocated and when there were restrictions on what cultural activities they could pursue. Black music does not just encompass sounds of the U.S. black experience but also a global black experience that stretches from Africa to Americas. The term for many coming from places of "black" origin can be perceived in a derogatory manner by cultures who see the term as a blurring of lines which ignores the true roots of certain peoples and their specific traditions. To refer to musical genres with strong African-American influence, such as hip hop music, is very limited in scope and is not adopted by academic institutions as a true category.

Their origins are in musical forms that arose out of the historical condition of slavery that characterized the lives of African Americans prior to the American Civil War. Some of the most popular music types today, such as rock and roll, country, rock, funk, jazz, blues, rhythm, and rhythm and blues were created and influenced by African-American artists. "Every genre that is born from America has black roots." White slave owners sought to completely subjugate their slaves physically, mentally, and spiritually through brutality and demeaning acts. African Americans used music to counter this dehumanization. White Americans considered African Americans separate and unequal for centuries, going to extraordinary lengths to keep them oppressed for being black. African Americans created a distinctive music that sank its roots deeply into their experience.

Black Musical

Following the Civil War, black Americans, through employment as musicians playing European music in military bands, developed a new style of music called ragtime which gradually evolved into jazz. In developing this latter musical form, African Americans contributed knowledge of the sophisticated polyrhythmic structure of the dance and folk music of peoples across the African continent. These musical forms had a wide-ranging influence on the development of music within the United States and around the world during the 20th century. The modern genres of blues and ragtime were developed during the late 19th century by fusing West African vocalizations – which employed the natural harmonic series, and blue notes. For example, "If one considers the five criteria given by Waterman as cluster characteristics for West African music, one finds that three have been well documented as being characteristic of Afro- American music. Call-and-response organizational procedures, dominance of a percussive approach to music, and off-beat phrasing of melodic accents have been cited as typical of Afro-American music in virtually every study of any kind of Afro-American music from work songs, field or street calls, shouts, and spirituals to blues and jazz."

The earliest jazz and blues recordings were made in the 1920s. African-American musicians developed related styles such as rhythm and blues in the 1940s. In the 1960s, soul performers had a major influence on white US and UK singers. In the mid-1960s, black musicians developed funk and they were many of the leading figures in late 1960s and 1970s genre of jazz-rock fusion. In the 1970s and 1980s, black artists developed hip-hop, and in the 1980s introduced the discoinfused dance style known as house music. Much of today's genres of music is heavily influenced by traditional African-American music. A new museum opened in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 18, 2021, called the National Museum of African American Music which highlights African Americans' contributions in the creation of new genres of music that have influenced American music and popular music around the world.

The new museum has a history of African-American music beginning in Africa to the present day. "It’s the only museum in the U.S. to showcase the 50-plus musical genres and styles created or influenced by African Americans — spirituals, gospel tunes, jazz, hip-hop and more." As well as bringing harmonic and rhythmic features from western and sub-Saharan Africa to meet European musical instrumentation, it was the historical condition of chattel slavery forced upon black Americans within American society that contributed the conditions which would define their music. Many of the characteristic musical forms that define African-American music have historical precedents. These earlier forms include: field hollers, beat boxing, work song , spoken word, rapping, scatting, call and response, vocality (or special vocal effect: guttural effects, interpolated vocality, falsetto, melisma, vocal rhythmization), improvisation, blue notes, polyrhythms (syncopation, concrescence, tension, improvisation, percussion, swung note), texture (antiphony, homophony, polyphony, heterophony) and harmony (vernacular progressions; complex, multi-part harmony, as in spirituals, Doo Wop, and barbershop music). In the late 18th century folk spirituals originated among Southern enslaved people, following their conversion to Christianity. Conversion, however, did not result in enslaved people adopting the traditions associated with the practice of Christianity. Instead they reinterpreted them in a way that had meaning to them as Africans in America. They often sang the spirituals in groups as they worked the plantation fields. African-American spirituals (Negro Spirituals) were created in invisible and noninvisible Black churches. The hymns melody and rhythms sounded similar to songs heard in West Africa. Enslaved and free blacks created their own words and tunes. Their songs mentioned the hardships of slavery, and the hope of freedom from bondage.

Spirituals during slavery are called Slave Shout Songs. These shout songs are sung today by Gullah Geechee people and other African Americans in churches and praise houses. During slavery, these slave shout songs were coded messages that spoke of escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad. The songs were sung by enslaved African-American people in the fields on slave plantations to send coded messages to other slaves. When slaveholders heard their slaves singing in the fields, they did not know they were communicating messages of escape. Harriet Tubman sung coded messages to her mother and other enslaved people in the field to let them know she was escaping on the Underground Railroad. Tubman sang: "I'm sorry I'm going to leave you, farewell, oh farewell; But I'll meet you in the morning, farewell, oh farewell, I'll meet you in the morning, I'm bound for the promised land, On the other side of Jordan, Bound for the Promised Land."

 

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