On Mar 4, 12:34=A0pm, hucktunes <bob.h...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Written by Jonathan Curiel
>
> Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to
> demonstrate the connection between Muslim traditions and American
> blues music, she'll play two recordings: The athaan, the Muslim call
> to prayer that's heard from minarets around the world, and "Levee Camp
> Holler," an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the
> Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.
>
> http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200604/muslim.roots.u.s.blues.htm
Hi hucktunes, the below is what I wrote on another list when this
article (from the San Francisco Chronicle) was posted there in 2004:
I don't think there is any reasonable doubt that Muslim music
influenced
West African music which in turn influenced "black" American folk
music,
and I think attempts to research that interesting topic are very
worthwhile.
Bearing that in mind, to leap from there to talking about _blues
music_ in particular, a style that arose around 1900, mostly among
_young_ "black" men judging from available evidence, is very
misleading
imo. And this article is full of questionable assumptions.
"'Levee Camp Holler' an early type of blues song...."
Why call "Levee Camp Holler" a "blues song," and what evidence is
there
to sup****t the notion that it is an _early_ type of blues song?
"... that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years
ago."
No one knows where blues first sprang up. That many of the greatest
musicians recording blues during the '30s, '40s, and '50s were from
the
Mississippi Delta proves very little about where blues originated in
about 1900. Ma Rainey said she first heard something that in
retrospect
she would consider a blues song in Missouri. The first known
publication
of a 12-bar "Blues" was in Louisiana. Some of the earliest-born
musicians
to record blues songs were from Alabama, Georgia, and Texas. "Joe
Turner"[...] is about events in Tennessee. The 16-bar
AAAB-lyric blues song, which almost certainly peaked in popularity
some
time during the 1910s, is uncommon in the repertoire of Mississippi
Delta
musicians relative to blues musicians from other areas. Mississippi
Delta
blues musicians who got the op****tunity to record for Paramount,
Lomax,
and so on, and thus are too often exaggeratedly seen as "the" "primal"
blues musicians, tended to be young, e.g. Skip James was 6 years old
when
Maggio's "I Got The Blues" was published in Louisiana.
"'Levee Camp Holler' is no ordinary song. It's the product of
ex-slaves..."
Where did that claim come from? Which ex-slaves wrote "Levee Camp
Holler"?
"... who worked moving earth all day..."
Who moved earth all day, as opposed to some other kind of labor?
"A nasal intonation is evident in both."
Considering that nasal singing was less characteristic of "black"
U.S. musicians born before 1900 than "white" U.S. musicians born
before
1900, I'd be careful not to put too much stock into that...
"I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two
things,
and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection)
was obvious,"
Or people clapped because they were being told something they wanted
to
hear, or...
"Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were
Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic,
historians
say now. Despite being pressured by slave owners to adopt Christianity
and give up their old ways, many of these slaves continued to practice
their religion and customs..."
If they continued to do that long enough to impact _blues music_ in
particular, why don't we hear references to Islam in blues songs? We
do
hear references to hoodoo and weather in China, for instance.
"These slaves' practices eventually evolved -- decades and decades
later,
parallel with different singing traditions from Africa -- into the
shouts
and hollers that begat blues music, historians believe."
Believing that shouts and hollers begat blues music is an old
assumption
people were making decades ago that is not borne out by the evidence.
Blues was a particular new kind of three-chord folk music that was
apparently far more closely related to bad man ballads, for instance,
than shouts and hollers. When the Lomaxes and their ilk asked elderly
people to sing shouts and hollers, they generally responded with songs
that have little to do with blues songs in the context of 1870s-1910s
"black" folk music generally. If there had been an im****tant overlap
between the two, that would not be the case.
"Drumming (which was common among slaves from the Congo and other
non-Muslim regions of Africa) was banned by white slave owners, who
felt
threatened by its ability to let slaves communicate with each other
and
by the way it inspired large gatherings of slaves."
Except by some slave owners. Fife and drum bands survived to be
recorded
in Georgia and Mississippi, and drum without fife turns up in some
slave
narratives too.
"Stringed instruments (which were favored by slaves from Muslim
regions
of Africa, where there's a long tradition of musical storytelling"
Is there any part of the world where there isn't a long tradition of
musical storytelling?
") were generally allowed because slave owners considered them akin to
European instruments like the violin. So slaves who managed to cobble
together a banjo or other instrument (the American banjo originated
with
African slaves) could play more widely in public. This solo- oriented
slave music"
How did we get from string-oriented to "solo-oriented"? Bands were
popular way, way back. Slave narratives routinely mention bands.
Perhaps
the person means oriented to _taking solos_ in a string band context
--
but that only became popular in folk music under the influence of jazz
during the age of radio.
"... says Gerhard Kubik, an ethnomusicology professor at the
University
of Mainz in Germany who has written the most comprehensive book on
Africa's connection to blues music ('Africa and the Blues')."
I remember Kubik, he's the guy who doesn't even know that
I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-V-I-I was apparently the most common chord
progression among early blues musicians (he has it as
I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-I, which is a '30s-to-present cliche that was
rarely used by '20s blues musicians, famous or not). I don't know how
he
gets us from the '00s-'20s all the way back to Africa without taking a
close enough look at the '00s-'20s to know that.
"You hear what we as Americans would call soulfulness or blues. That's
definitely in there."
"Soul" and "blues" don't describe the same thing. The usually
ragtime-influenced blues of the 1910s apparently had little in common
with "soul" music in style.
"Also, by the turn of the 20th century, the progeny of America's
Muslim
slaves had generally converted to Christianity, either by force or
cir***stance."
Given that the progeny are the people who invented blues music, one
could
say blues music was invented by people who were generally Christians.
"... the technique that Handy [recalled he] witnessed [about 1903] --
that of pressing a knife on guitar strings -- can be traced to Central
and West Africa, where, as Kubik points out in 'Africa and the Blues,'
people play one-string zithers that way. Handy assumed the technique
(which is now called 'slide guitar') was borrowed from Hawaiian guitar
playing, but it's more likely that the itinerant guitar player that
Handy
met in Tutwiler was manifesting his African roots."
It's more likely because what? Didn't Muslim music influence Southern
European music too, and couldn't music from Southern Europe also find
its
way to immigrant workers in Hawaii or wherever else? Why the double
standard that one of Handy's claims (that he did see this as early as
'03, and isn't e.g. mixing up two different incidents in his mind)
accepted without question, while another of Handy's claims, that it
was
borrowed from Hawaiian, rejected as probably false? Handy was not very
young in '03, was plenty old enough to potentially have good
perpective
on what was mostly borrowed from Hawaiian when and what he'd never
heard
before the Hawaiian craze.
"A good example is the song 'Little Sally Walker.' It's been recorded
by
many blues artists, but it's also been recorded as 'Little Sally
Saucer'
(the lyrics describe a girl 'sittin' in a saucer'). Frankie Quimby, a
relative of Bailey's who also traces her roots to Bilali Mohammed,
says
the song originated during slavery on the Georgia coast, written by
songwriting slaves who took the last name (Walker) of their slave
owners."
Has Frankie Quimby investigated the possibility that it originated in
Britain?
"Because there is little do***entation about these slave-time
[musics]..."
Untrue.
"The modern guitar is a direct descendant of the oud, an Arabic lute
that
was introduced to Europe during Spain's Muslim reign. In fact, there's
a
connection between Renaissance music and Arab-Islamic culture, a
connection that academics have studied with more precision than the
connection between black Muslim slaves in America and this country's
blues music."
The most popular instruments among slaves were fiddle and banjo.
Guitars
became popular among "black" Americans only well after Emancipation
when
they were mass marketed at a low price. So let's note that the fact
that
the guitar is a relative of the oud has little relevance to the notion
that the popularity of guitar among blues musicians has something to
do
with Muslim influence on Africa.
"Those slaves' pain is evident in American blues music -- a music
that's
often about cruel treatment, sad times and a yearning to break free."
The main theme in early blues songs is male/female relation****ps.
Protest
songs are no more common in early blues songs than in folk music of
the
era generally.
"Without the blues, there wouldn't be jazz..."
I'd love to see a historical argument sup****ting that one. Most of the
earliest-born jazz musicians routinely performed many types of music
other than blues and seem to have had little familiarity with '10s-
style
rural blues.
", wouldn't be the bluesy music of the Rolling Stones and the
Beatles."
The blues songs that the Rolling Stones and the Beatles performed, as
opposed to say "Lady Jane" and "Yesterday," wouldn't be blues songs if
there had never been any blues songs. True.
"In his book 'Black Music of Two Worlds,' author John Storm Roberts
says
he can hear patterns of Islamic African music in the songs of Billie
Holiday. Roberts refers to the 'bending of notes' that is evident in
Holiday's sad, soulful ballads as well as the call to prayer. This
same
note-bending can be heard in the music of B.B. King and John Lee
Hooker."
In my opinion there is less note-bending in the oldest material Hooker
recorded (such as "Rabbit On The Log") than in the younger material
Hooker recorded (i.e. '20s-'40s in style). Hooker could have been
influenced to bend notes by the increasing influence of hard gospel on
secular "black" music during the '40s on. (Influence of hard gospel
style
singing on secular "black" music before the '40s was apparently
slight.)
B.B., John, and Billie are/were so relatively young that these are
basically bogus examples as far as drawing clear connections to Africa
are concerned. (Which isn't to say that "black" U.S. Christian music
wasn't influenced by Muslim African music!)
"'It's about uncovering a hidden past,' says Bayoumi, asked about the
spate of new scholar****p on the subject of Islam and African
Americans.
'You can hear (influences of Islam) in even the earliest days of
American
blues music....'"
I'd be interested to know which recordings Bayoumi believes represent
"the earliest days of American blues music."
You want to hear something American that sounds African, forget blues
and
listen to 1800s-born banjoists (such as John Snipes), fife and drum
bands, and all sorts of things from south of the U.S. border. But
_blues_, a _U.S._ style that arose among people born roughly 1885,
gets
the (supposed) research here in looking for links to Muslim Africa
because so many non-researchers out there _know what blues is_, have
heard of it, and like it. That seems rather intellectually dishonest
to
me, or at least obviously chronologically misguided. There is a huge
mass
of recorded pre-blues "black" folk music out there, and that music is
very underresearched relative to blues.
Joseph Scott
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