The music of African-Americans is characterized by a style that fuses African and European elements. The 15 million and more Africans taken as slaves to the New World from the 16th century to the 19th were cut off from their own cultures. Despite their dispersal, music united them in a way that transcended barriers of language and custom, for example, at festive gatherings. The first African-American church congregations were formed in the late 18th century. Music for formal worship consisted of psalms and hymns; spirituals were performed after worship or at midweek services. With the singing went ‘the shout’, a form of religious dancing with hand-clapping and foot-stamping.
The first black musician known to have written in the European tradition was the former slave Newport Gardner (1746-1826), who gained his freedom and became a singing-school teacher and song composer. The first ‘school’ of black composers evolved in the second decade of the 19th century, led by the composer and bandmaster Frank Johnson. Members included James Hemmenway, Aaron J.R. Connor, William Appo and Henry F. Williams.
After the Civil War, African-American music came to be more widely heard. From 1872 amateur student groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Institute Singers, toured abroad. Black choral groups that sang ‘genuine’ plantation songs were widely used in white stage shows of the late 19th century. Lightly disguised, plantation songs also appeared on the minstrel stage. Celebrated minstrel songwriters included Horace Weston, Sam Lucas, James Bland and Gussie Lord Davis.
New folk styles evolved in black communities in the late 19th century. The piano rag, originally played in black honky-tonk cafés and gambling saloons, reflected the coalescence of European marches and quadrilles with elements of plantation dance music; Scott Joplin wrote numerous piano rags, a ragtime ballet and two operas. A second folk style, the vocal blues, obscure in origin, probably dates back at least to the 1880s. The minstrel bandleader W.C. Handy was first to popularize the blues with his Memphis Blues (1912) and St Louis Blues (1914). (See Ragtime and Blues).
During the early 20th century the various types of African-American music - spirituals, shouts, rags, blues and syncopated music played by brass bands and dance orchestras - began to fuse into what was later known as Jazz. Jelly Roll Morton is credited with being the first to notate a jazz arrangement (Jelly Roll Blues, 1915). Black musical nationalism reached its peak in the works of William Grant Still, the first composer to use all the folk idioms known to his generation, from the spiritual to the blues, in symphonic music. Nationalist feeling was also evident in the musical comedies produced by African-Americans from the 1920s.
Jazz groups now began to attract attention. New Orleans was established as the capital of jazz; but the tradition was soon carried to Chicago, and New York became the major centre for the big bands, one of the first of which was organized in 1923 by Fletcher Henderson. During the 1920s and 1930s a new kind of religious music, later called Gospel, appeared in black churches; its style, a direct heir to the shouts and jubilee songs, was disseminated through oral tradition at gatherings such as the meetings of the National Baptist Convention. Jazzmen of the 1940s experimented with new ideas, resulting in a new style called bebop, then simply Bop.
Several black composers continued to work in the European-based art-music tradition in the 1940s and 1950s; some used neo-classical techniques, including Howard Swanson, Ulysses Kay, George Walker and Julia Perry. In the 1960s, plantation songs and gospel were adopted for marches of the civil rights movement. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, composers produced memorial works drawing on black musical elements. The Society of Black Composers was founded in 1968, the Black Artist Group in 1972 and the Black Music Research Journal in 1980.
The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
