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The Music of the Deep South |
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Saturday, 28 January 2006 03:49 |
The Music of the Deep South
By John Sinclair
The Deep South has always been a different place from the rest of America. Everything fresh and inventive in American popular culture has always had its roots in the Deep South and, beyond that, in the West African lands from which America's slaves were dragged and shipped in chains to be sold into a horrible new life of forced labor and inescapable servitude.
Life in the Deep South engendered a peculiar cultural construct shaped by the twisted moral philosophy of the slave-holding Protestant planters and relentlessly subverted and imaginatively reshaped by the African slaves and their descendants.
The slaves long struggle to gain their humanity in the land of their captivity resulted in the creation of startlingly new, genuinely American musical forms which gave expression to the unique experience of the slave population.
These forms went on to invade, inform and ultimately transform the mainstream culture of their captors. In the agrarian South, where this struggle was most intense, the slaves resistance to the Protestant crusade to uproot and eliminate their ancestral practices never wavered.
It was this resistance that preserved essential African forms of worship and creative expression and gave them new life as the uniquely African-American musical idioms known as gospel, blues and jazz.
Gospel and blues, two sides of the same musical coin, evolved from the wildly emotive spirituals adapted from the simple Protestant hymns of their masters and sung in the crude rural churches sanctioned by the slaveholders which were the only permissible venue for any form of religious worship.
The blues form evolved from the work songs, arhoolies, moans and field hollers that emerged out of the harsh work life of the slaves in the cotton fields, plantations, levee camps, sawmills and other centers of slave labor.
Starting in the 1840s, these idioms in their developmental form were adapted and parodied by black-faced troupes of white entertainers who performed what they called minstrel shows for audiences of British and European extraction all over America. These shows are credited as our nation's earliest manifestation of what we now know as show business.
Minstrelsy was based in the rustic musical entertainments prepared and staged by slaves on the Southern plantations for the amusement of themselves and their masters, but until Emancipation the originators of the genre who had inspired and informed commercial minstrelsy were barred from participating in its evolution as a popular cultural attraction.
The end of slavery, following the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the conclusion of the War Between the States, finally provided African Americans in the Deep South with the opportunity to sell their labor and develop as individuals, albeit within the cruel framework of the feudal agrarian economy that kept most of the ex-slaves chained to the same land and vicious living conditions they had endured under slavery.
But those former slaves and their offspring who were able to escape the sharecropping system to seek a more rewarding form of life now enjoyed the precarious freedom to move from place to place in the South and, eventually, to the industrial cities of the North.
This migrant population included a new type of individual represented by the itinerant musicians from Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and South and North Carolina who had synthesized worksongs, field hollers, and rustic spirituals into an intensely vivid new musical form which would come to be known as the blues.
Seeking a personalized expressive form to give voice to a new range of concerns in their ceaseless quest to make a habitable place for themselves and their families in this strange land, many rural bluesmen moved with their fellow citizens from plantation country to settle in the bustling cities of the Deep South: Memphis, Atlanta, Jackson, Birmingham, Houston, Dallas, Mobile and New Orleans. There they brought the blues into urban life before the turn of the 20th century.
After Emancipation, the African American musicians and entertainers who had developed their proficiency on the plantations or in the early black educational institutions of the South were finally allowed to pursue careers in show business. They joined the companies of touring minstrel shows that were being organized by white entrepreneurs to take advantage of the widespread interest in authentic minstrelsy, which had been generated by the heretofore exclusively Caucasian minstrel outfits.
These minstrel shows toured the nation, introducing general American audiences to the novelty of black entertainers. An entire generation of skilled musicians, singers, actors and comedians emerged who would graduate from the minstrel circuit to take their place on theatrical stages and other venues more sophisticated than the county fairs, expositions and tent shows where the minstrel shows had been featured.
During the same period, rough-hewn itinerant backwoods pianists and small-town barroom keyboard entertainers began to develop a second distinctive idiom by fusing blues and syncopated rhythms with marches and popular songs in the European tradition.
In the rural lumber and turpentine camps of Louisiana, Mississippi and East Texas and in the bars, nightclubs and brothels of the tenderloin districts of the burgeoning cities of the South, a generation of inventive, self-schooled pianists infused European musical forms with the wit and rhythm of Afro-America.
There they laid the foundation for the nation's first popular music craze, the syncopated style known as ragtime which swept the country from coast to coast and ruled America until the end of the First World War.
In New Orleans ragtime piano took root in the city's innumerable street-corner barrooms and dancehalls. The form was soon adapted and transformed by the brass band musicians who played for the dances, parties, picnics, funerals and parades which were an integral part of the everyday life of the African American citizens of the Crescent City.
The blues entered New Orleans with the new wave of migrants from Mississippi and informed the music of the ragtime pianists, the fervent Baptist church choirs and the marching brass bands, ultimately inspiring the emergence of the consummate African American musical idiom which would become known as jazz.
Buddy Bolden, Chris Kelly, Joe King Oliver and other early bandleaders infused the blues into the brass band repertoire, improvising lusty variations on the simple blues chord patterns to the delight of dancers and listeners alike.
In all of the Deep South, during the long nightmare of American slavery, it was only in New Orleans that African Americans were able to retain, preserve and extend the essential forms and substance of their ancestral lifeways on American soil.
The otherwise dominant Protestant culture of the South never gained full supremacy in New Orleans, and there endangered African religious and cultural practices could be masked under the mantle of the prevailing Roman Catholicism.
While the Protestant landowners and merchants throughout the agrarian South remained fanatically dedicated to rooting out and eradicating every manifestation of Africanism from the slave population, the French and Spanish slaveholders in New Orleans allowed the displaced Africans and their descendants to gather each Sunday in Congo Square to practice their native music and dance forms.
These weekly public gatherings helped preserve the relationship between spirituality and artistic expression which is central to the West African worldview. African Americans congregated at Congo Square well into the American ascendancy following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and these activities were not curtailed until the decade or two before the outbreak of the War Between the States.
The end of slavery in New Orleans thrust African Americans into the center of the city's cultural life. Their burgeoning Benevolent Associations and Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs sponsored a full calendar of funeral parades and social events which utilized the exuberant marching bands that were organized after Emancipation.
Soon, in the streets of the city's poorest precincts, groups of African American citizens began masking as Wild Indians on Mardi Gras day, dancing through their neighborhoods and making music based on ancestral African rhythmic and call-and-response patterns which preserved and extended these essential cultural retentions in a remarkably pure form.
Just before the turn of the 20th century, the beats, chants and rhythms of the Mardi Gras Indians, the wildly emotional ritual music of the African American churches, the syncopated marches and spirituals played by the marching brass ensembles and ragtime bands all came together in an amazing amalgamation that resulted in the creation of a new musical form which would provide the basis for American popular music to follow.
From its humble origins in the African American precincts of the Crescent City, the music that would later be called jazz with its dynamic balance between ensemble cooperation and the genius of the improvising soloist was carried from New Orleans to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and every section of the country to which Americans of African descent had traveled and resettled in their massive exodus from the Deep South during the period between Emancipation and the first World War.
But the new music was coming alive all over the South as well, with each region from the Atlantic Coast to the Rio Grande adding its distinctive flavors and colorations: from the airy Piedmont blues of the East Coast to the deep blues of Mississippi and Arkansas and Louisiana and the jazzy jump blues of Texas and Oklahoma.
Blues singers popped up everywhere, accompanying themselves on guitar or piano or singing in front of hot little jazz bands, performing everywhere from street corners to backwoods saloons, from tent shows to concert halls, cabarets and nightclubs.
There were blues jug bands, rude string ensembles, piano-guitar duos, blues harmonica virtuosos, rough instrumental ensembles improvising on blues themes and changes a whole new world of music brought to life across the Deep South and deeply steeped in its folkways and regional idioms.
Blues entered American show business and began to meet the general public when W.C. Handy published The Memphis Blues in 1912 and kicked off a wild new craze.
Syncopated rhythms for dancing were popularized two years later when Vernon and Irene Castle introduced the fox trot, dancing to the music of African American composer and bandleader James Reese Europe.
The raggy ensemble music developed in New Orleans first got called jazz that same year and the Dixieland Jass Band, a white outfit from the Crescent City, created a national sensation when they took New York City by storm a couple of years later. They made the first jazz recording in 1917 and were soon followed onto disc by authentic jazz artists like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and the young Louis Armstrong.
The advent of blues recording came in 1920 when Mamie Smith cut New Orleans composer Perry Bradford's Crazy Blues for Okeh Records in New York City. Her immediate success opened the door for other blues singers like Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and the great Gertrude Ma Rainey, one of the pioneers of the classic blues singers idiom.
Likewise, the success of Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues in 1925 quickly led to thousands of blues 78s by musicians from the Deep South like Tommy Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Son House, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey.
The transplanted culture of the Deep South thrived in the northern ghettos and spread across America through the disembodied sound of phonograph records. Early jazz and its successor, swing, captivated the entire country and reigned supreme as America's popular music through the end of World War II, when a new hybrid out of the Deep South called rhythm & blues created the template for pop music in the second half of the century.
Discovered by white America ten years later via the medium of music radio and re-named rock & roll, this Deep South concoction swept across the world displacing everything in its path.
Between the two World Wars, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the Deep South to resettle in the industrial cities of the North and the West Coast. They brought with them the sound of blues, jazz and gospel music with them to ring throughout the black ghettos of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. The urban streets rang with the sound of blues, jazz and gospel brought with them by legions of southern musicians.
Since the introduction of ragtime, spirituals, blues and jazz, the Deep South and its immediate urban outposts Memphis, St. Louis and Kansas City have continued to produce a disproportionate share of the genius innovators, improvisers, and musical inventors who have played a major role in the development of American music.
From W.C. Handy to Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, Roy Eldridge to Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis; from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Elmore James, from Charlie Christian to T-Bone Walker and B.B. King, thousands of sons and daughters of the deep south contributed to the impact that has altered the shape of music all over the world.
The music of the Deep South provided the soundtrack for 20th-century America. While it has long transcended its place of origin, the sound of the Deep South has continued to develop and grow from its locus at the heart of African American life.
In Mississippi the blues remains a vital force among rural and small-town blacks, providing a constant means of expression and a popular form of entertainment for people who continue to labor and struggle in what blues scholar Alan Lomax has called the land where the blues began.
In the urban centers of the South, soul music, a modern idiom which fused blues with gospel to touch the hearts of Americans of every persuasion, first emerged as the eloquent voice of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and maintains its currency throughout the South today.
And here in New Orleans, where the lifeline to Mother Africa was never completely severed, the music and culture of the Deep South flourish at the center of everyday life as always, connecting the present to the Southern past and its West African roots like nowhere else in modern-day America.
Every historical form from the music of the brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians, ragtime piano, barrelhouse blues, early jazz, small-and big-band swing, bebop and electric blues to R & B, gospel and soul can still be heard today in the countless nightclubs, neighborhood bars, concert halls, churches, open-air venues and streets of the Crescent City, where the music first emerged so many long years ago.
The Deep South &.as Sunnyland Slim said: It's always been blues down there always will be, until the end of time.
--New Orleans
March 28, 2002
(c) 2002, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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