"3 1148 OUyuo e.\ 10 DATE D U S 133 shining trumpets shining trumpets A HISTORY OF jazz BY RUDI BLESH silver trumpets, be you lifted up, And cry to the great race that is to come! Long-throated swans upon the waves of time Sing loudly, for beyond the wall of the world That race may hear our music and awake. WILLIAM BUTLEB YEATS 1946 ALFRED A KNOPF NEW YORK TK* is a Borzoi Book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passaged or reproduce not more than three illustrations in^ct review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by The Ryerson Press PIEST EDITION TO MY DAUGHTER HILARY AND HER TAILGATE TROMBONE 6409174 INTRODUCTION JAZZ music is a purely American phenomenon. In its pure and authentic form it has been in existence perhaps seventy-five years and has been a part of the general American scene for the last twenty-five. Throughout this time it has been an ob- ject, of wide and often bitter controversy. Its true nature and its relation to other kinds of music have been but little under- stood. The possibilities of revolutionary development within jazz, and in Western music through the use of its technical principles, have hardly been perceived at allyfH s\* The importance and value of jazz begin to become apparent onlj^ todajj 'In the meantime its origins have become obscure, its essential nature and its significance lost in a fog of mis- understanding. A half-dozen kinds of music bearing no struc- tural relation to jazz are accepted by the vast public, not only as jazz, but each as its only form,, The need of a serious book about authentic jazz is therefore imperative at this time. Such a book will explore the beginnings and trace the progress of this music, analyze and define its na- ^ m This is the sort of book I have tried to write. , J V ,,,^.^. - . t * . ff Fortunately, jazz in rrf&ny of its phases has an invaligua of documentation that of the phonograph record. More than ^ any other musical field the recording is vital in jazz, a spon- taneous, improvised though systematic music, composed in the playing. I have found it a pleasant necessity to study hundreds of records, many old favorites of, mine and some un- familiar ones, and to cite itptl describe a ^number of these in this book. It is unf ortunatf ti^at %e majority of these are not, shining trumpets INTRODUCTION at this writing, available to the public. However, their analysis was essential. It is gratifying to know that steps are being taken to assemble large Jibranes^of recorded jazz.th^t ,will v be ava^l- able, andfit is to be hoped that the large commercial recording companies will continue and accelerate the reissues of their priceless old discs for general sale. This book represents a large attempt. Jazz music, itself a big and surprisingly little known subject, includes lesser ones. It is, in turn, part of several of wider implication : all Afro- American music for one thing, an influence on the "serious" composer for another. A thorough treatment of jazz as music not only deals with the American Negro but goes all the way back to Africa. It carries both the writer and reader into questions of deep soci- ological import relating to the position of the Negro in this democracy and questions of oj^gHtej^^ of this blacj^ minority^ And thus we are led, through general coMiderations of our society, into equally general, equally vital ones concerning all music and all art and the relation of the everyday human being to these high manifestations of the crea- tive urge in man. There is no clearly defined road through this complex field. If misunderstandings cloud the history of jazz, they are symp- tomatic of subtler and more deep-rooted ones that befog the history of all human culture. For man does not always under- stand what he or his brother is compulsively impelled to do and to create. This book, accordingly, should reflect the nature of its ma- terial: it should be complex and yet simple ; it should be serious and gay at the same time ; it should be both factual and poetical. It will be unavoidably technical in certain passages, but I shall try to lighten these by sections reflecting those basic human feelings, experiences, and aspirations from which all real art springs. This is the large attempt. The scope and the importance of the subject matter have m$e it w^il worth the try. If it has x shining trumpets INTRODUCTION succeeded I ask only an amanuensis' credit, for my material was as rich as the rich earth itself. [ ? * ^ ' ' ' ' I am most grateful for the kinds and amount of help I have received from jazz critics, friends, scientists, and institutions of learning, and from the men who play jazz. It was at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1943 that I gave the jazz lectures which have led finally to the writing of this book. To recall the Museum is to think gratefully of its director, Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley, and, its then curator, Mr. Douglas MacAgy, who so enthusiastically sponsored my lectures. The anthropologists Professor Melville J. Herskovits and Dr. Richard A. Waterman have rendered great and generous assistance. The former put at my disposal the fine recorded li- brary of African and Afro-American music, at Northwestern University. Mr. B. A. Botkin similarly assisted me through the rich mazes of recorded American folk music in .the Library of Con- gress. And I am indebted to Dr. L. D. Reddick, curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History in New York, for his, valuable help'. I thank Mr. Roy Carew for needed information concerning ragtime, Miss Marili Morden for certain important historical data, and both for lists of ragtime compositions and jazz tunes. I am indebted, for varied information and for access to cer- tain rare records, to the jazz critics and writers, Frederic Ram- sey, Jr., Nesuhi Ertegun, Kenneth Lloyd Bright, and others. Mrs. Frances Oliver and Mrs. Amede Colas have furnished me with vital information about their brother, the late Ferdi- nand (Jelly Roll) Morton. f For this, as well as for the loan of rare photographs of Morton, I am very grateful. My thanks are due to Judge Nathan R. Sobel for technical help and to Helen Hall for illustrative material. The musical scores in this book were done by the American composer Lou Harrison, who worked enthusiastically and in- defatigably with difficult and virtually unscoreable material xi shining trumpets INTRODUCTION to produce the most nearly accurate scorings ever, to my knowl- edge, made of Afro-American music. They reflect his serious approach. I am in the debt of the noted composer and critic, Mr. Virgil Thomson, and likewise of the writer, Mr. Herbert Weinstock, for generous and discerning critical suggestions. Help, freely given and of great importance, came from the players of jazz. For all of this, the priceless historical data, technical information, rich anecdotes, and rare photographs, I am heavily indebted to these men. Among the many, I must mention and thank the great Negro musicians: Willie (Bunk) Johnson, Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Al- phonse Picou, Wallace Collins, Edward (Kid) Ory, Thomas (Papa Mutt) Carey, George Lewis, Louis de Lisle (Big-Eye) Nelson, Peter Bocage, Joseph Petit, Warren (Baby) Dodds, Jim Robinson, Minor (Ram) Hall, Sidney Bechet, George (Pop) Foster, Jimmy Yancey, Albert (Buster) Wilson, Ed (Montudi) Garland, Omer Simeon, Darnell Howard, Tom (Georgia Tom) Dorsey, Bertha Gonsoulin, Montana Taylor, Arthur (Bud) Scott, Charles (Cow Cow) Davenport, Sid Le Protte, and the blues singer, Bertha (Chippie) Hill. Valued help was likewise forthcoming from the noted white players: George Brunies, Melvin (Turk) Murphy, Paul Mares, and Finally, constant assistance has come to me from Harriet Janis. Without her lucid advice and penetrating critical sug- gestions, freely and generously given, this bpok would never have seen the light. It remains to be said that, regardless of documentation, the basic ideas I express and the conclusions I reach herein are my own. R. B. Xll CONTENTS BOOK ONE ' 1. Black Music PAGE 3 2. Drums to America 25 3. In Southern Fields and Churches 47 4. Along the Roads 81 5. The Blues: One 98 6. The Blues: Two 123 BOOK TWO ,\ 7. New Orleans and the Beginnings of Jazz 151 8. Classic Jazz 173 9. Black and White Bag 198 10. Chicago 217 11. Golden Discs 239 12. Manhattan Swing 262 13. Jffoi Piano 292 14. Trumpets for Tomorrow 322 Appendices 342 is o/ Eecord Citations 362 Musical Examples FOLLOW PAGE 365 and Index of Music FOLLOW MUSICAL EXAMPLES ILLUSTRATIONS Speaking drums in Africa FOLLOWING PAGE 80 Modern instruments in Africa 80 Ma Rainey (from Paramount catalog] 80 Ma Rainey in formal attire 80 Ma Rainey with her band 80 Bertha "Chippie" Hill 80 Early band in uniform 80 Momus float The Battle of Cavadonga 80 Momus float The Caliph of Spain at Cordova 80 A fimerol at Gretna 80 Street parade 80 Baby Dodds at the bag factory 80 The Jaz-E-Saz Band 80 Jelly Boll Morton in Storyville 80 Big Eye Nelson and Freddie Keppard 80 Eiverboat band on the S/S Sidney 80 Riverboat band on the S/S Capitol 80 Masonic Hall 80 Hopes Hall 80 Economy Hall 80 Providence Hall 80 Joseph "King" Oliver FOLLOWING PAGE 80 Boy players at the New Orleans Car Earn 80 The New Orleans Rhythm Kings 80 At the old De Luxe Cafe 256 King Oliver at the ball park 256 Jelly Boll Morton in Chicago 256 King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band 256 The Original Dixieland Jazz Band: 1917 256 The Original Dixieland Jazz Band: 1937 256 Louis Armstrong in Chicago 256 The Hot Five 256 Edward "Kid" Ory 256 Bunk Johnson recording in New Orleans 256 Bimk Johnson recording in New York 256 xvi shining trumpets BOOK ONE SONG TO THE EARTH GOD The need is great, And great our need to sing, For days of trouble are upon us. The bullock ofAbomey Says to him of Cana, It is the day of trouble; The carrier of grain, Says to the bearer of salt, Thy load is heavy, brother, And this the day for carrying; The bearer of the dead Says to the carrier of ladders, It is the day for carrying loads, It is the day of trouble. TRANSLATION FROM THE DAHOMEAN BY FRANCES S. HERSKOVITS 1. black music JAZZ began about three quarters of a century ago. In New Orleans, soon after Emancipation, there occurred an extraor* dinary concatenation of circumstances that could not have oc 1 curred elsewhere and, perhaps, can never occur again, even there. From them jazz emergedT It began not merely as one more form of Negro folk music in Ainenc^but as a fusion of all the Negro musics already present here. These, the work- songs, spirituals, ragtime, and blues, all stemmed back more or less completely to African spirit and technique. Negro crea- tive power, suddenly freed as the Negroes themselves were freed from slavery, took all of this music and added elements of Amer- ican white folk musics. It added, as well, the music and the dis- tinct instrumentation of the marching (brass) band and the melodies of French dances (memories, even, from the French Opera House), the quadrille, polka, waltz, the rhythms and tunes of Spanish Amelia and the Caribbean, and many other musical elements. * > The American Negro poured these rich and varied ingredi- ents into his own musical melting pot and added his undying memories of life on the Dark Continent and the wild and tumul- tuous echoes of dancing, shouting, and chanting in New Or- leans 5 Congo Square. Undef" the pot he built the hot fire of creative force and imagination and then, preparatory to a mir- acle, stirred them all together. For jazz is no musical hybrid; it is a miracle of creative synthesis. Jazz is the music that the whites in New Orleans saw only as "nigger" music,"^scafciely gs important, even, as those silly, shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 shallow, and condescending white imitations of Negro song, the minstrel melody and "coon" ^onff. It was something to be listened to with guarded pleasure rnrahe honky tonk or in the Negro street parades that, even today, the white children are not freely allowed to follow; something perhaps even to be danced to if the inferior black men of the orchestra sat on a platform with their faces to the wall. The guarded pleasure and the inhibited response are only explainable in part as a fear of the power of the Negro musical genius to break down the social and economic barriers set up against the race. Deeper still, perhaps, the motivation was the age-old human fear of the strange and the new, for jazz and the Afro- American mu- sic it culminates are a new and revolutionary element in our culture. ""!< / The understanding of jazz^-asi opposed to the mere emotional Reaction to it, requires effort. This is even more true than with our own serious, or classical, music, for the latter, unlike jazz, represents a continuous development in gur own native culture. Yet never was understanding more richly rewarded. Jazz has widened our artistic horizons immeasurably ;. subtly but unmis- takably it has influenced our own musical practice. But, more important still, it is an art in itself, profoundly different in concept and practice from our own. The pure development of its own values is imperative if we are to avoid a grave cultural loss. A music, improvised freely by blacks and whites together, it sounds a summons to free, communal, creative living. A mu- sic of vital and forward motion, jazz is a symbol of that impro- visational process, guided by the instinct for freedom, which" all social progress essentially is. We were and are unprepared to accept the Negro as an equal member of our democracy; we are unprepared to accept his jazz at its true value. Of what avail is it that it be accepted with intelligence and discrimination outside America, if here, where it is made, it is distorted and devitalized by social pressures exerted upon its creators? Perhaps the growing appreciation of the epochal importance of jazz as an art form will not only 4 shining trumpets BLACK MUSIC ensure its continued and free development and constructive white participation therein, but will bring through an un- derstanding of his art an increasing awareness of the Negro's stature and integrity as a man. Jazz, the original musical creation of the American Negro, is a synthesis of African and European * material so predom- inantly African in character and method that it might be more accurate to define it as an African art form which, arising in this country, utilized and transformed much European ma- terial. It was, and where still played it remains, a unique music, different from European music. Its uniqueness depends upon its combination of certain qualities. Throughout the music the Negro has made in our country, we can trace with special clarity the purity or dilution of the African character that enters so decisively into jazz. In the early rural work-songs we find much African material and some foreign material treated in a very Negroid manner. The evolution of the spiritual involves selective borrowing of European melody with a slight adoption of harmony ; African technique plus the selective process, itself, preserves the cultural continuity. The spiritual is the first type that is recognizably Afro-American. The process of selective assimilation and technical treatment resulted, about 1870, in the creation of a new musical form in rural areas the blues. This form signifies that a balance has been obtained between Western material and African technique. It is the stabilization of the Afro- American quality. At about the same time, Negro urban folk music in New Or- leans resulted in an instrumental music, jazz. This -music rep- resents the borrowing of the widest variety of non-African mu- sical material that the Negro had attempted, together with the adoption of European instruments. African technique trans- formed the material wh$e evolving an African instrumental / i In this book European will be used to apply equally to all American white art forms, inasmuch as we are a part of the European tradition in art and music. shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 method. In jazz, the balance between African' and non-African is delicate but firm, the over-all effect still markedly African. Its richness of content, complexity of development, and unique musical character make jazz the first fine-art form created by the American Negro. Classic jazz, from 1890 on, is the high point of Negro musical achievement in this country to date. It is an achievement only the Negro could have made, and not even the Negro elsewhere. The dilution and deformation of jazz took place from 1920 on because of the influences of commercialism, white playing, and sophistication of the Negroes themselves. This has ad- vanced to the point where the music frequently ceases to be predominantly a Negro form, becoming a hybridized popular music rather than a fine-art form. The development of swing music began in the early 1920 ? s. Swing, which is not jazz, is a type of European music with transplanted Negroid characteristics. Even when produced by Negroes, it is Negroid only in surface manner. Simultaneously, the educated Negro devoted himself more and more to accepted European forms opera, concert mu- sic, et cetera in which the creative element has largely dis- appeared and the Negroid character is diluted to th^ vanish- ing point. It lingers only in unchangeable timbres, rhythmic characteristics, and occasionally in a notable technical pro- ficiency. This dilution of African character occurs on one level of Negro society, while elsewhere Afro-American music continues in certain of its pure, earlier stages. Today we find the singing of the true Afro-American spiritual widespread among the churches of at least one sect ; that of the fine archaic blues un- diminished in unsophisticated secular sections; and the im- provised performance of early classic and even archaic jazz still carried on strongly by a minority. The ^whole development of Afro-American music from its African technical origins is summed up in ,the first part of the chart on pages 18-23. The first part lists the African survivals shining trumpets BLACK MUSIC in Negro jazz. The second part of the chart is a corollary, point by point, of the deformations of Negro jazz; it can be used as a measure of the decadence within jazz or as a guide to those deceptive elements, not numerous or decisive enough, which, bor- rowed from jazz, make the present-day commercial swing falsely seem another* form of that music. This listing of African cultural survivals in jazz, entirely apart from the rich variety of European material incorporated, prefigures the complex nature of the music. Its complexity, strangeness, and novelty tend to explain why, on the whole, it has not been really understood, much less adequately evaluated. Criticism of jazz from the point of view of European music must be misleading and fruitless because our modules do not fit or our criteria apply. On the other hand, the approach from the African point of view is not adequate : it cannot take into sufficient account American environment plus European art in- fluence and too often has no critical function in an aesthetic sense. Something like a combination of these approaches into a new critical process is needed. About half a century after its inception, when jazz had trav- eled out of New Orleans and over the United States, it had a reception that, if more open-armed in its enthusiasm, was still as shallow and undiscerning as it had been in New Orleans. Jazz as played by Negroes in Chicago or New York, was still "nigger" music to white listeners. An extraordinary apparition, exciting and disquieting, in the years of World War I, jazz was accepted by the white pub- lic as no more than a pleasurable aid to dancing or as a phe- nomenon of war hysteria. It was as though the dislocation of feeling and purpose that war causes in other fields were operat- ing in our music, a music we share in the general European tradition ! Had jazz appeared in more peaceful times would it, perhaps, have been received differently? Would it have been perceived as the new and unique music it was and is, with its own style and content, rigorously opposite, with a final polarity, to Eu- shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 ropean music today? Or to any phase or possibility implied therein? It scarcely seems likely. Classic jazz began when Eu- ropean music, in the late nineteenth century, was about to reach the ultimate stage of harmonic chromaticism within which free melody is all but stifled. Everything in jazz is opposed to such a harmonic-chromatic process ; in it harmony is allowed no such power. If jazz is similar to any European music at all, it re- sembles most nearly the antiphony and horizontal polyphony of medieval European music and the ultramodern polyphonal and dissonantal school of today. Nearly three hundred years before the origin of jazz, we had lost sight of or forsaken the possibility of development from such a base, just as the prin- ciple of improvisation was abandoned later in favor of that ad- vance charting by the blueprints we call musical compositions. Only in France, the first country to accord intellectual recog- nition to jazz, did free-melodic music survive through Rameau, persisting to the present day through Satie, Milhaud, and others in the face of the pseudo-French school of post-Wag- nerian harmonic tendency exemplified by Franck, Faure, and Chausson. It was scarcely to be expected that jazz, a pure im- provised polyphony falling on unaccustomed ears, would be immediately understood. Neoclassicism in modern European music means a revolt against the harmonic smothering of melody, a revolt that jazz had already won. This tendency toward a polyphony free of the requirements of consonant harmony first caught the public ear forcefully in 1913 with the initial performance in Paris of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, The compositions of this modern school, while admitting a high degree of dissonance, are not wholly free of preoccupation with har- mony, and this is most true when the use of clashes is most de- liberate. We find a true polyphony of the neoclassic sort in African choral singing, with its dissonances arising logically through the polyphonal development of the melodic lines. This po- lyphony, of course, combines with a complex percussion in a shining trumpets BLACK MUSIC melodic-rhythmic counterpoint unknown in European music. And we find this Negroid polyphony, as early as the 1870's in New Orleans street band jazz, in an instrumentation and in melodic derivations more directly comparable with European music. By the 1890 5 s jazz was in firm existence in New Orleans, where a long-standing tradition of light and classical European music could have been expected to furnish a guide to the mean- ing of jazz as an art form separate from the European tradi- tion. Instead, its thrilling and deeply moving qualities, its direct appeal to the heart, its amazing virtuosity and astounding mu- sical complexity, its demands on spontaneous creativeness posing then and thereafter difficulties almost insurmountable for the white player all these qualities, even those immedi- ately perceivable, fell on deaf ears and oblivious minds as mere "nigger 55 music. More is involved in this than the position of the Negro in Southern society or in our society as a whole. There is more to it than our unconscious racial complex, our jealous guarding and fostering of a hypothetical white superiority. The condi- tioning of the ear by European music, and more important our grounding in classical European theory act as a barrier to our appreciation and understanding of this music. Nevertheless, Negro music, if not ragtime and jazz, had early champions among white people, learned or otherwise. Early in this century, for example, the American music critic, H. E. Krehbiel, began to investigate American Negro folk music. His critical work is of lasting value because he clearly perceived the African material and spirit in this music. But a blind spot operates in peculiar ways in Krehbiel's work. He is impressed with the necessity of proving this music American after having shown its African origin and character ; he cannot forget that he is the "superior 55 white, these the "inferior 55 blacks. "Why savages who have never developed a musical or any other art should be supposed to have more refined esthetic sensibilities than the peoples who have cultivated music for centuries, passes shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 my powers of understanding," 2 he says at one point. Yet in another he speaks of the Dahomeans : "The players showed the most remarkable rhythmical sense and skill that ever came under my notice. Berlioz in his supremest effort . . . produced nothing to compare in artistic interest with the harmonious drumming of these savages ... it is impossible to convey . . . the wealth of detail achieved ... by exchange of the rhythms . . . syncopation of both simultaneously, and dynamic de- vices." In another he deplores ragtime, meaning also jazz: ". . . the dance which is threatening to force grace, decorum and decency out of the ballrooms of America and England is a survival of African savagery, which was already banished from the plantations in the days of slavery. It was in the dance that the bestiality of the African blacks found its frankest ex- pression." And the other early critics? Most of them were artistically blind or morally purblind. A little later a few, Ernest An- sermet and Darius Milhaud among them, saw rather clearly the newness and greatness of the music. But jazz suffered nearly as much harm from the blindness of its friends as from the hostility of its enemies, regardless of the walk of life of either. One cannot exaggerate the protest with which jazz was met when, in the 1920's, it had spread to Chicago and New York. Composers, critics, ministers of the church, laymen, pundits, and ignoramuses had their fling. The storm was historic. An entire era was called the Jazz Age. Not only the sins of its flappers and gin-toting lounge lizards came to be blamed on this ineffably nefarious music, but also nearly all of the woes of the postwar world up to and including the 1929 crash in Wall Street. 8 Although many knew then that jazz had been played in, among other places, whorehouses and wine shops, and judged it 2 This and succeeding quotations are from Krehbiel, H. E.: Afro- American Folksongs. New York: 1914. s Eeverberations of the storm penetrated even to New Orleans, where the Times-Picayune rose hastily to disavow any connection of jazz with its na- tive city. 10 shining trumpets BLACK MUSIC accordingly, none knew that it was a fine art transcending its surroundings. Nevertheless, many of the people knew that it was their music, a music created for them by men using lack of formal musical education as a freeing factor in hot and spon- taneous creation. The men wanted, needed, to create it ; their fellows wanted, needed to listen, to dance, to respond to, and to be freed by it. In our society there is a prevailing factor slower but more relentless than the war cries of all the minorities. It exists in the whip of economic pressure that assails from outside and the dry rot of commercialization that eats from within. Taken together as components of one evil force, they can spell the ruin of any art. They extend the concept of the profit motive into aesthetics, where profits can have no benign or construc- tive meaning at all. The commercial era in music was well under way in America by the early 1920*s. Through radio and the talking motion pic- ture it extended its octopus hold, which today is fastened upon virtually all the sources and public outlets of professional mu- sic. Everywhere its strangling pressure is felt, in the limited symphonic repertory and the gagging of the new composer, who can scarcely achieve public hearing ; in the increasing ba- nality of popular music, and in the appearance of swing, an aural activity devoted to neurotic excitement and the cliche. Such classical music as survives in the commercial repertory fares well enough, in a sterile sort of way, protected by its un- alterable score and its traditional interpretation. But true jazz, which must be improvised by inspired and devoted players, withers in such an atmosphere. Commercialization was a cheapening and deteriorative force, a species of murder perpetrated on a wonderful music by whites and by those misguided Negroes who, for one or another reason, chose to be accomplices to the deed. The story does not make pleasant reading for those who love art or believe in progress, and it has implications far beyond art. To read it is to be forced to question to a degree some of the basic things in our society. 11 shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 What happened to jazz is a little laboratory test, if you will, of democracy. "Giving the people what they want," in this case at least, consists of planning a product that can be put together by hacks, that can be profitably sold to the people, and then, amidst an advertising campaign unrelenting and continuous, can be unobtrusively substituted for what the people already wanted and had. As long as this is a diffused process arising more or less as the end result of a social-economic system, it may be accepted by the many and resented or feared by the few, and is seldom seen in its full implication. A case can be made for the nationalization of the resources of the human spirit, for the taking of buying and selling out of art, for the subsidizing of artists and the preservation of artistic values, uncontaminated and undistorted, for all the people. Commercialization is almost always inimical to the integrity of an art in the creative stages. When we consider that real jazz is always improvised and is, as long as it exists, perpetually in the state of creative inception, we see that commercialism is a thing not only hostile, but fatal, to it. An equally powerful force, subtler and more disarming and able to seduce sincere and seemingly intelligent people, may be called the "illusion of improvement." It springs from a dual misconception about jazz. The first part of the misconception postulates jazz as crude and imperfect because its creators were Negroes of humble origins, uninstructed in the tf technique and theory of European music. Unseen is the fact that, except for this fortunate circumstance, jazz could never have been created. The second part of the misconception is that jazz is poten- tially a new form, not in itself, but as a part of the European tradition; that it was hit on, luckily and fortuitously by its "gifted, but ignorant" creators and, therefore, should be taken over and developed from this point by trained, "superior" mu- sicians. In this connection it should be pointed out that primi- tive does not mean crude and unformed or ill-formed, tenta- tive or barbarous. It means instead a point of view, a way of looking at the world innocently, directly, and imaginatively. 12 shining trumpets BLACK MUSIC Like the primitivism of children, it sees without veils and re- cords in its own peculiar, powerful, magical symbols. This helps to explain the easy adaptability of the Negro to Western ways and the ease with which he adopts elements of arts foreign to him. This process can be seen in our American public schools, where children of all races and nationalities tend to get along much better than their emers. So the attempt began twenty-five years ago, and is still go- ing on, to "improve" jazz by maldng its content, method, and execution more and more like the whole European tradition. It was tempting to those outside, who were able to avoid the labors of trying to understand a new art form and at the same time to rationalize this sidestepping in an apparently laudable attempt to work improvement. It was equally alluring and thrice disastrous to the practitioners of jazz itself. Only a few of them, through their own integrity, or because one thing or another forced them out of the playing of jazz during its unpolluted Golden Age, were able to stand aloof from this sud- den urge of jazz players to "improve and refine" their music. It is obvious now that if jazz can be left free to develop prop- erly, it will certainly find, in its own forms and implications, its own progress and proper refinement. But while Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin and a host of others outside jazz, began to "improve" it and try to make of it symphony, concerto, and opera (all the things it was not, and which, if it needed ever to become, it needed to become by its own means), men like Louis Armstrong were at work within the inmost core of jazz. On its outmost fringes were men like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Jimmy Lunceford, all busy expanding the small jazz group into the large swing band, which deserts polyphonic practice to embrace harmonic development and the arranged playing of instrumental sections. The larger band might have come about properly in jazz. But it would have come when the individual skill in playing im- provised polyphonic parts had grown to the point at which 13 shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 more voices could be added to the polyphony beyond the three or four then within the reach of the performers and the per- ceptive power of the listeners. There were moments when King Oliver's large band, or even Erskine Tate's, gave a momentary glimpse of the jazz possibilities of the large group. Had the unchecked tendency to "improve" jazz sprung from understanding, undistorted by the white's supreme difficulty in playing and creating it, and had it not been misdirected by the Negroes' hypersensitivity to criticism, it would have been a factor powerfully favorable to the development of the music. Unfortunately, it has led to the creation of a hybrid Afro- European form of doubtful worth. It has led to a painful and superficial sophistication in its player-creators, to a deluge of the mere noise called swing, to a dozen forms of hybrid jazz, and to a spate of symphonized jazz and pseudo-jazz master- works. Nevertheless, unspoiled jazz is a Negro art as important as it may be disturbing, as richly rewarding as it may be stim- ulating. It throws a many-sided challenge to the white race, a challenge we have pretended to misunderstand or have chosen to ignore, a challenge that is only a part of the unsolved problem, not forever to be ignored, of the Negro in our democracy. The history of jazz has been a short one, a span of develop- ment and fruition remarkably compressed in time. In this mu- sic's history a year has been roughly equivalent to a decade in the history of European music. In the latter, development was slow and periods long ; in the general sanction given to the art as a whole, it could comfortably wait for critical vision and popular acceptance to catch up with the progress of the art. But with jazz, the total misunderstanding of the music, the dubious position of its Negro creator in white society, as well as his pathetic and ill-founded desire to please the white, created an unstable condition in the art itself. It tended in part to vacillate and to respond to the winds of ignorant opinion. It should not be thought that jazz is, or was, therefore, an art without strength or integrity. 14 shining trumpets BLACK MUSIC All fine arts, more divorced than the folk arts from ordinary life, have in all times and places needed support, have sought and found the sponsor, the enthusiast, and the wealthy patron, either among the individuals in society or in a paternalistic and discerning government. Yet, while jazz is a fine art, it has not been recognized as such, has found few patrons, and has been forced to attempt to subsist as a folk art. This, as a form re- quiring arduous and lifelong devotion, fanatic and unworldly absorption from its practitioners, it could not do. It could live in New Orleans, as it still does to a very considerable degree. Even there, as a big and growing thing, a folk academy with its adepts and novices, it could exist only as long as, to the patronage of parade, funeral, and public dance, was added the scope of employment and the handsome largess of commercial vice in the Tenderloin. In this, too, there is involved the whole position of the Negro in a society where, after three and a quarter centuries, he rep- resents an unassimilated and despised minority. Many a Negro found, fairly early, that his best chance of a measure of success among the whites was to canalize his vast creative power into forms of European art. Thus, he early tended to alter his spir- ituals, deforming them by a recasting into the European mold. This Europeanization began about 1871 at Fisk College. To- day Negroes like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, capable of great creative work, devote their powers to the mere interpre- tation of European repertory and Europeanized Negro music. Jazz itself has largely yielded, except for a few incorrigible veteran players and groups of young enthusiasts, to its own Europeanization. Meanwhile, under the surface, the ferment of creative power goes on. Most of the forces comprising the jazz spirit remain alive. Everywhere, in the city and in the country even, un- recognized and unwittingly, in the churches the Negroes are singing the blues. This, the hot core of jazz, seemingly cannot be extinguished. The elaborate instrumental jazz structure 15 shining trumpets CHAPTER 1 reared upon it may fall before the winds of prejudice, hostility, or lack of understanding. Underneath, the beginnings of jazz are still nurtured as with the jealousy of a mother. Is it possible that, from these unquenchable sources, from the efforts of the remaining players of pure jazz, from the tradition of the art at its highest point of evolution, and with the help of the white understanding that has recently been awakening, these forces can be concentrated once more into the form jazz took in its own Golden Age? Can progress re- sume, undistorted and unvitiated, from that point? There are signs that this may happen. Jazz, whose fair- weather friends deserted it twenty years ago, has been finding new friends among enlightened and liberal people. At this moment everything points to a great and imminent revival, all opposing forces to the contrary. When that happens tomorrow we shall hear the shining trumpets again. 16 CHART, SHOWING AFRICAN StJRWALS IN NEGRO JAZZ AND THE DEFORMA- TIONS OF NEGRO JAZZ AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN NEGRO- JAZZ THE HOT CONCEPT: I. Tendency to use any melody or harmonic pattern as a base for free improvisation of melody. II. Inducement of the Trance Intuitive creation. A. By rhythmic repetition. B. By melodic repetition. III. Creative participation A. Tendency to group improvisation. B. Forming a rhythmic-tonal whole by inclusion of 1. Rhythm-pattern of dancers' feet. 2. Dancers 5 singing, shouts of excitement, approval, et cetera. IV. Avoidance of monotony by incessant variation: A. Rhythmic B. Tonal C. Melodic RHYTHM: I. African patterns in rhythm instruments, especially the drums. II. Over-all rhythm of the band : A. Perpetual syncopation. B. Polyrhythm. 1. Displaced accents forming a different pattern than the basic one inner-rhythm. 2. Polyrhythm in European sense, i.e. two or more meters or patterns simultaneously over-rhythm. C. Single over- all patterns. 1. Stomp. Melody is made to fit to the Stomp pattern. 2. Riff. Perhaps derived from the Stomp, this re- peated, simple, melodic-rhythmic figure is spar- ingly used in jazz. III. The beat or pulse, evolves in meter A. Through live accenting. B. Through playing very slightly before or after the strict metric beat, principally after. TEMPO: I. Strict tempo or controlled acceleration. II. Moderate, never too fast. Relaxed, and with room for im- provised part-playing. 18 DEFORMATIONS OF NEGRO JAZZ DEPARTURE FROM THE HOT CONCEPT: I. Tendencies to A. Straight playing of melody. B. Mere embellishment or rhapsody. II. Inability to achieve the Trance Substitution of A. Intellectual conceptions, especially a priori. B. Uncontrolled excitement or gross sentimentality. III. Diminution of creative participation. A. Loss of ability in group improvisation and substitu- tion of arranged ensemble, while limiting improvisa- tion to solo. B. Tendency to concert, not dance, music. IV. Monotony versus variety: A. Use of monotonous repetition to build up neural ex- citement, B. Variety through mere effects. RHYTHM: I. African patterns in rhythm instruments dropped or used in stereotyped way. II. Over-all rhythm of the band : A. Perpetual syncopation progressively dropped loss of momentum. B. Polyrhythm: 1. Little inner-rhythm. 2. Little European polyrhythm. C. Single over-all patterns. 1. Stomping dropped out early. 2. Overexploitation of the riff, because it is facile of execution, adaptable to written or memorized arrangement, and an easy substitute for melodic invention. III. The beat or pulse. A. Return to European idea of beat 1. By giving even time-value to all beats a dull beat. 2. By playing on the beat or else by pushing, i.e. anticipating the attack. TEMPO: I. Unconscious tendency to Rubato or to uncontrolled ac- celeration. II. Tendency to overf ast tempi unrelaxed and crowds and distorts the part-playing. 70 AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN NEGRO JAZZ (continued) INTONATION: I. Contrary to European pitch : A. Intonation free of the fixed scale. B. Microtonal flatting, especially the third and seventh blue notes, as derived from pentatonic and hexatonic scale structures. II. Fluctuations in pitch. A. Wide use of glissandi. B. Tone coloration by undulation or wavering of pitch. C. Use of very wide vibrato. TONALITY: I. Tendency to reduce the scale to pentatonic or hexatonic and to improvise within the simple tonic-dominant chord sequence. II. Disinterest in key changes, lack of modulation, except in marches and ragtime. MODALITY: I. Indeterminate although predominantly major in feeling. Constant shifting in area between major and minor through microtonal flatting of third and seventh, especially in glis- sandi. TIMBRE: I. Vocalized instrumental tone. A. Dirty tone, growl, wa-wa. B. Great variety of unorthodox tone qualities. C. Hot tone. MELODIC FACTORS: I. Stress on melody developed independently of harmony. II. Antiphony (The Call-and-Response) . A. In the Blues form. 1. In the order of vocal or lead phrases. 2. In the relation of these to the accompanimenl phrases. B. In alternation of solo and ensemble. C. In the placing of instrumental breaks. 20 DEFORMATIONS OF NEGRO JAZZ (continued) INTONATION: I. Conforming to European pitch-norms : A. Strictly w-twne playing. B. Semitonal flatting only (See HARMONY, below). II. Fluctuations in pitch. A. Glissandi rarer, used decoratively and sentimentally, not structurally. B. Little undulation. C. Narrower, European vibrato. TONALITY: L Tendency to preserve the full European diatonic scale. II. Tendency to modulation and key changes in European tradition. MODALITY: I. Definite mode and changes from major to minor. The Blues generally distorted by playing them completely in the minor. TIMBRE: I. Vocalized tone not characteristic of white or of much so- phisticated Negro playing. A. Tendency away from Dirty tone, toward pure. B. Limitation of tone to accepted Pure types. C. Hot tone rarely achieved, as this results from true Negroid improvisation. MELODIC FACTORS: I. Melodic invention shaped by harmony. II. Antiphony. A. Preserved with phrase mutilation in the Blues form. B. Tendency toward a continuous series of solos. C. Breaks progressively minimized. 21 AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN NEGRO JAZZ (continued) MELODIC FACTORS (continued): III. Polyphony (development from antiphony). A. Parallelism and unison very rare. B. Polyphony (combination of varied melodic lines) tending away from harmonic domination, C. Heterophony (developing out of B ) , i.e. counterpoint of melodic variations that have reached status of new melodies as compared with the theme. MELODIC CHARACTERISTICS: I. Direct survivals of African melody. II. Negroid alteration of white melody A. Inline. B. In compass. C. In rhythm. D. In variation. HARMONY: I. Tendency to eliminate harmony. A. Reduction to the simplest progressions. B. Polyphony preferred to 1. Melody with harmonized accompaniment. 2. Melody m harmony. C. The approach to prevailing dissonance, by 1. The progressive dropping of harmony in the heat of improvisation. 2. The development of polyphony into heterophony. II. Substitution of varied rhythmic, tonal and melodic interest for paucity of harmonic interest. 22 DEFORMATIONS OF NEGRO JAZZ (continued) MELODIC FACTORS (continued) : III. Polyphony. A. Parallelism and unison increase, become predominant in swing. B. Polyphony decreases and eventually, when it exists at all, is vertical (harmonic). C. No heterophony in white jazz except a chaotic sort in Chicago-style jazz. MELODIC CHARACTERISTICS: I. Alteration in line with the white tradition of surviving Af- rican melody. II. No alteration of white melody toward an African character. A. When melody is played straight, it is in European manner, sometimes with faked jazz idiom. B. Variations are European, including much ornamenta- tion and figuration. HARMONY: I. Re-establishment of harmonic predominance. A. By augmented instrumentation, duplication of im- struments precluding group improvisation and lead- ing to section playing in harmony. B. Amplification of harmony. 1. Through symphonic scoring, involving rich and varied harmony. 2. Tendency of popular song toward more varied harmony. C. The shunning of dissonance. 1. The brass band not a strong factor in white jazz. Furthermore the white brass band adheres to har- monized arrangements. 2. Dissonance in the white or mixed Jam Session arises from rivalry rather than from polyphonic development ; is wild and chaotic. II. Varied harmonic richness and interest gradually supplants the Negroid rhythmic and melodic variation. 23 2. drnnis to america Musique n&gre! Que de fois loin de I'Afrique, y*ai cru t'entendre, et subitement se recreait autour de toi tout le Sud . . . ANDES GIDE AFRICAN music is the key that unlocks the secrets of jazz. For jazz, regardless of the origins of its melodies, is a mcmner of playing derived directly from the music of the West African Coast. The continuity of this manner is directly traceable mu- sically and, in part, historically, from the first importation of slaves to this country through all the different kinds of music the Negroes have made in their three and a quarter centuries here. Great importance has been attached to the fact that much American Negro music is based upon white melodies, ballads, and Scotch hymns* Actually, this is of slight importance com- pared with the profound transformation of this basic material in its Negroid rendition. The Negro transforms all that he sings or plays. The hymn, for example, partly transformed, be- comes the spiritual. Completely transformed, it becomes the blues, a truly new musical form. The basic material is recast in its scalar compass and its tonal intervals, revoiced In its timbres, and completely altered in its rhythmic character. (See Appendix A, p. 34$.) African, particularly West African, music has been a com- plex and highly developed art for centuries. Its origins are perhaps more remote in the past, its continuum of development perhaps of a longer span, than those of European music. Built 25 shining trumpets CHAPTER 8 upon the simplest fundamentals of all music, namely rhythm and tone, it evolved into an art profoundly different from ours in shape, spirit, and meaning. Basically it emerged, as did all music, from dancing and from speech developed through chant- ing and declamation into song. All music probably began on the improvisational plane, as a communal rather than a specialized activity. A high degree of f ormalization is likely to follow, mak- ing the art the province of skilled professional performers. In Africa, however, and in really Negroid music everywhere, the communal and improvisational aspects are largely retained. In our music, formalization forced out improvisation, led to the growing importance of the composer and the scored com- position, and led, likewise, to the growth of a professional body devoted to the practice of an increasingly esoteric art. In our culture, dancing and music were separated centuries ago in the religious and serious secular pursuits of the art ; folk mu- sic was split from the main musical trunk ; music as a fine-art form began to develop. But the vitality of a music is to be found in its communal aspect and in constant invention in perform- ance. Our composers inevitably ha,ve had to turn to folk music for melodic ideas and rhythmic life. As the split between the people and music has widened, this process has become increas- ingly eclectic and artificial. As nature strives to close and heal a wound, society con- stantly is trying to take music back to itself. But the secret of singing and dancing as a natural human activity gets partly lost. Music today is packaged in radio, motion picture, and phonograph record; it is taken like pills. Amateurs in every town form little symphonies and chamber societies. Playing the scored masterpieces of our music, they have, in the feeling of communal activity, the illusion of creation, just as one toiling in the gymnasium might have that of active and creative living. Meanwhile, the composer languishes; the real seriousness of music original creativeness is lost and its real nobility vit^l connection with life disappears. When jazz appeared on the American scene seventy-five 26 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA years ago, the African concept of music as a creative, participa- tive artistic activity was presented to America by the Negro. Music is the most highly developed and universally practiced of the arts in West African culture. On the plastic side, this culture produced the superb wood sculptures of Gabon and the bronze ones of Benin, work that, early in this century, deci- sively altered the course of European painting and sculpture, and provided space concepts utilized in modern architecture. The music, as it survived and developed in Afro-American mu- sic, is exerting an equal effect upon our composers and per- formers. Particularly in jazz, it has developed into an art of prime importance in itself, unassimilable as a whole into our music. 1 The pure Negroid influence, freely acknowledged through- out Europe, is discounted in America because of the inferior position the Negro, originally the slave, always has occupied in our society. A false concept or stereotype of the character and the past of the Negro was formed early in this country. Emancipation, precipitating economic rivalry between black and white intensified this stereotype as a defense mechanism. Melville J. Herskovits has outlined and refuted it. His chief points follow: 1. Negroes are naturally of a childlike character, and adjust easily to the most unsatisfactory social situations, which they accept readily and even happily, in contrast to the American Indians, who preferred extinction to slavery ; 2. Only the poorer stock of Africa was enslaved, the more intelligent members of the African communities raided having been clever enough to elude the slavers* nets ; 3. Since the Negroes were brought from all parts of the Afri- can continent, spoke diverse languages, represented greatly differing bodies of custom, and, as a matter of policy, were dis- tributed in the New World so as to lose tribal identity, no least i "African and European music arc constructed on entirely different prin- ciples, and therefore they cannot be fused into one, but only the one or the other can be used without compromise." Hornbostel, E. M. von: African Negro Music. (Reprinted from Africa, Vol. I, No. 1 (London?) n,d. 27 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 common denominator of understanding or behavior could have possibly been worked out by them ; 4. Even granting enough Negroes of a given tribe had the opportunity to live together, and that they had the will and ability to continue their customary modes of behavior, the cul- tures of Africa were so savage and relatively so low in the scale of human civilization that the apparent superiority of Eu- ropean customs as observed in the behavior of their masters, would have caused, and actually did cause, them to give up such aboriginal traditions as they may otherwise have desired to preserve ; 5. The Negro is thus a man without a past. 2 The stereotype operates in two ways. As propaganda that, in the South, approaches a conspiracy, it is used to justify and conceal repressive and discriminatory measures and activities. It is apparent justification for the poll tax, which prevents the "ignorant 55 Negro from voting. It bolsters the exclusion of the Negro in many areas from many professions, particularly, per- haps, medicine. It conceals sexual rivalry in accusations of rape and the horrible continuance of lynch law. Yet the stereo- type is more dangerous and more insidious as unconscious bias and prejudice in our thinking. Otherwise intelligent people base their whole approach to what is called the Negro Question upon the unreasoning acceptance of this myth. In literature, and from the black-face minstrels down to the motion pictures, the Negro has been portrayed either as a lazy, shiftless, childlike clown or as a devious and dangerous liar, until this portrait is etched deeply into our consciousness. Our thinking about the racial problem is thus clouded by uncensored and diffused emo- tionalism, by stubborn and subtle misconception. - The misunderstanding of jazz is to be seen as part of the larger problem of the Negro in our society. And, as the under- standing of African music clarifies that of jazz, so knowledge of the Negro character and his past clarifies and helps to solve the problem of the Negro in our democracy. Such a clarifi- cation is needed, not only among the whites, but among the 2 Herskovits, Melville J.r The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: 1944. 28 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA many Negroes who have come to accept the myth. Herskovits writes : It is little wonder that to mention Africa to a Negro audi- ence sets up tensions in the same manner as would have re- sulted from the singing of spirituals, the "mark of slavery, 55 to similar groups ageneration ago. Africa is a badge of shame; it is the reminder of a savage past not sufficiently remote, as is that of European savagery, to have become hallowed. Yet with- out a conviction of the worth of one's own group, this is in- evitable. A people that denies its past cannot escape being a prey to doubt of its value today and of its potentialities for the future. To give the Negro an appreciation of his past is to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he musTN|ave, and which he can best attain when he has available a foundation of scientific fact concerning the ancestral cultures of Africa and the survivals of African- isms in the New World. And it must again be emphasized that when such a body of fact, solidly grounded, is established, a fer- ment must follow which, when this information is diffused over the population as a whole, will influence opinion in general con- cerning Negro abilities and potentialities, and thus contribute to a lessening of interracial tensions. 8 Music, including drumming and singing combined with dancing, plays a very large and important part in the social, economic, and religious life of West African Negroes. It is rich in corresponding- elements from tribe to tribe. 4 Of all the arts of West Africa, music at least singing is the most com- munal. In the music of the African, and equally in that of the Amer- ican Negro, it is difficult to attempt a rigorous separation into s Ibid, p. 32. 4 Outside the United States, particularly in Brazil- and Haiti, the Negroes set up their own African religious cults parallel to or syncretized with Chris- tianity, especially Catholicism. They have been able, also, to continue many African social customs, such as marriage and burial ceremonies. In this coun- try, the work-song and certain social dances survived; the religious cere- monials died out. In their place, new musical forms arose. Everywhere, how- ever, tribal differences, lingual and social, failed to impede the making of a music that, as in Africa, has a general form free of tribal limits, 29 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 rhythmic and melodic elements. The nature of the melody is rhythmic ; even where a part of the rhythm is kept separate in drum battery, piano bass, or jazz-band rhythm section, the melodic voices are not only complexly rhythmic in their own right, but tend to flow over into, or absorb into themselves, the basic rhythm. They are profoundly interacting; the whole forms not only a polyrhythm, but one not set to a formal, pre- determined pattern. It is a thing alive and growing in itself, as sensitively interconnected and inter-responsive, as the branches of a tree, weaving in several directions and in several rhythms while they respond to the same wind. Rhythm and its development are the fundamental African aims ; form and formal development of melody m harmony are the European. Thus one has to begin with movement and mo- mentum on the one hand, the structure of forms on the other : the locomotive or the airplane, the mountain or the temple. Rhythm, in Africa, is expressed in percussion and in melody that can be free and improvisational, antiphonal or polyphonic, but never limited by considerations of a prevailing harmony. Form, in Western practice, is expressed in melody and melodic development that, imbedded in harmony, produce form and formal arrangements. In Africa, development, variety, and contrast come through unstemmed motion, through constant variation or mutation, often improvisational, through the combination of several rhythmic and melodic parts. In our music, rhythm is an ad- junct, not the prime consideration; the momentum is checked or altered by changes in tempo or in the basic metrical pattern itself. Essentially, the forms in Western music are different melodies or the same melody variously expressed in different keys and rhythms, in contrasting major and minor modes, in a variety of harmonizations and instrumentations, in various inversions and variations of line. These forms are juxtaposed and contrasted to secure a feeling of architectural balance and satisfying structural completeness. In African music, one melodic or purely rhythmic voice, or 30 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA several combined, continue to flow in a basic pattern of rhyth- mic and melodic repetition. This never flags, but, on the con- trary, is likely to build up slowly and controlledly in tempo. These repetitions, which produce a rapt and hypnotic state in players and listeners, are nevertheless infinitely varied in many musical ways and grow constantly in complexity. Essentially, Western music is one of structure ; African, one of free, continuous, creative energy. The European concept is one of building from contrasted moods ; the Negroid is one of complete and exhaustive exposition of a particular mood. Such distinctions are, of course, ultra-simplified, too broad. For European music has movement, too. Our medieval music moved in a horizontal combination of voices similar in some re- spects to African polyphony. There never was, however, the feeling for an inexorable rhythmic momentum or the combina- tion of vocal polyphony with percussion that are characteristic of African music. And, for centuries, harmony became more and more important in our music. By Bach's time it was begin- ning to limit the melodic voices in polyphony. It ended by strangling polyphony completely until modern times. Harmony, though produced adventitiously in any combina- tion of voices, is not a concept basic to music in the sense that melody and rhythm are basic. Harmony, with its developing theory of consonance (or agreeable sound) opposed to diso- nance( clashing sound) , becomes, in time, a vertical element op- posed to the horizontal flow of melody and rhythm. Melodic lines are restrained by the necessity of conforming to a develop- ing chordal pattern and (even more basically) by the limita- tions of the fixed pitch and the tempered scale that result from an elaborated harmony. In all so-called primitive music, pitch is not limited to the full-tones, half-tones, and scales of our system. The penta- chord, or tonic-dominant of our system, is played or sung in Africa with faultless pitch, furnishing a stable base around which the other tones are used in an infinite variety of grada- tions with differences as subtle as those of the sixteenth-tone. 31 shining trumpets CHAPTER % Pitch, too, limits our music in its use of the glissando or slid- ing tone, one of the expressive features of Negro singing and playing. With us such long glissandi, sliding upward or down- ward are considered in bad taste and, heard in the "tailgate" or circus-style trombone of jazz, are thought vulgar or merely humorous in a crude way. The glissando is a natural characteristic of the human voice in speaking or singing and in the playing of all absolute mu- sical instruments, those in which the pitch is not fixed. A rich source of expressiveness, it is found in all Afro- American mu- sic, vocal or instrumental, and outstandingly in jazz, not only in the trombone and clarinet styles of New Orleans, but also in the wide and fantastic trumpet glissandi with which Louis Armstrong confounded symphony players who had considered the feat impossible except by use of a mechanical device, With its freedom of pitch and linear formation, African melody does not need chromaticism, the succession of half-tone intervals. On the contrary it tends to avoid half-tone steps. Chromaticism, with us, signalized in Tristan und Isolde or the VerJclarte Nacht of Schonberg a revolt against the limi- tations that harmony imposes, as well as the actual dissolution of harmony. Breaking down in the development of modern mu- sic toward a dissonant polyphony, harmony did not lose its hold on our musical thinking. For the tones fixed in pitch, which harmony had led to, remained ; to seek dissonance is still to be preoccupied with the idea of consonance. A music free of har- monic rule, like the Negroid, seeks neither. Harmony enters into African music in the main only in the chanted chains of consecutive thirds, fourths, and fifths, rising arid descending. This harmonic device, one of great beauty, strengthens rather than weakens the melodic line, in no way im- pedes the rhythmic flow, and is not harmonic progression in our sense of the word, but a colorative enrichment of the idea of unison singing. We find these chord-chains in the spiritual, as severely limited as in Africa to accord with antiphonal-polyph- onal practice. 32 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA Harmony, with us, limits the concept of timbre. The com- bination of voices or instruments in a chord requires, besides accurate pitch, a quality of tone that will blend. Thus we have the concept of pure tone, which excludes all the wide variety of timbres that are so expressive and of such essential importance in Negro music. Negro voices have characteristic quality and variety of tim- bre. Expressiveness and variety of tonal qualities are sought rather than pure 5 tone. In the exploitation of vocal range the upper reaches of the falsetto are used. The qualities, in their variety, include a rough gravelly tone, known in jazz as dirty tone, guttural, shrill, rich, husky, hoarse tones of a flutelike and woodwind quality, and, occasionally, the pure timbres of Eu- ropean singing. There is the vigorous recitative type of singing that Negroes call shouting; humming also is used. The develop- ment of harmony in Europe caused many expressive timbres to be discarded. The concept of richness of tone, especially in solo work, came to be added to that of purity because this qual- ity in the single tone produces the feeling of richness of the chord. There are many degrees of richness and purity in Af- rican and Afro-American singing and in the instrumental play- ing of jazz. But tone with the Negro develops, like melody, from its own natural basis of expressive significance. The common characteristics of most African Negro tribal musics are : antiphonal and polyphonal singing combined with percussion; a tendency for rhythm especially in the drum percussion to reach a high degree of development in pattern formation, syncopation and polyrhythm; and the contra- puntal combination of separate rhythms. These same character- istics are carried over into all Afro- American music up to, and including, jazz. Antiphony in Africa is the statement of the leader and the answer of the mal, female, or mixed chorus. The leader chants, often improvisationally, in strong declamatory phrases. The B Pure, as descriptive of tone, is different in meaning than when, used to describe melody free of harmonic limitation. 33 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 chorus responds in beautiful periods that rise and fall in free melodic undulation, high, clear, and in unison or in haunting chains of thirds or fourths. Polyphony in Africa developed from the overlapping of these calls and responses. The chorus tends to enter before the lead- er's phrase is finished or to continue after it has begun. This combination of leading and choral melody becomes a two or three-part polyphony. The musical styles of various African areas are not yet fully documented or differentiated, though important work is in progress. The West Coast area, from which the slaves were taken, concerns us, particularly the related musics of Dahomey, the Ashanti, and the Yoruba. According to Herskovits, a large proportion of the slaves in New Orleans were of Dahomean provenance, brought there directly from Africa or from the Caribbean islands, particularly Haiti. A valuable study of West African music is the unpublished manuscript, Die Musik Westafrikas, by M. Kolinski, in the anthropological library at Northwestern University. Much of this study is based on the 600 or more cylinder recordings, chiefly Dahomean, made in Africa in 1931 by M. J. and F. S. Herskovits. Some of the data used in the following comparison of African and Afro-American music are drawn from this source. In Afro-American' music many kinds of percussion hand- clapping, foot-stomping, et cetera may be subsitituted for drums to a greater extent than in Africa. The African drum rhythms are characterized by cross-rhythms. The term poly- rhythm has become a highly controversial one in the field of modern music, and has come to have several conflicting mean- ings. I shall therefore substitute my own terms, based on what happens rhythmically, for the term polyrhythm in either of its accepted senses. The first is the wner-rhythm, which creates rhythmic patterns by the shifting of accents or by the use of tacit (silent) beats. The second is the cross-rhythm or over- 34 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA rhythm, a sort of rhythmic counterpoint produced by the simul- taneous playing of two or more distinct rhythmic patterns. (See Appendix B, p. 344.) In the United States drumming and the manufacture of drums were not freely encouraged by the slave-owners. In their fear of slave revolts many did their utmost to stamp out African customs and rituals. Yet legends persist of nocturnal meetings in the woods where, as Dorothy Scarborough relates, 6 homemade drums were beaten under washtubs to muffle the sound. Never- theless drums were made. One from Virginia, (dating from 1728), is in the British Museum. It is a matter of record that drumming went on from about 1817 until the middle 1880's in New Orleans' Circus Square (called Congo Square by the Negroes) and elsewhere in that city. Drumming, however, was much more circumscribed in the United States than elsewhere in this hemisphere. Despite this, the tradition of percussive polyrhythms has persisted in the hand-clapping and stomping of the spiritual-singing in the churches, in the jazz band, and, in one form or another, in all Afro- American music. But while polyrhythm has persisted, its character has changed somewhat. Perhaps this is because of the clandestine character it assumed for a time and its later emergence in new social contexts in which the set and formal- ized character of the African originals tended to be lost. In this country it is at once simpler and more complex. The basic fig- ures, evolved in 2/4, 4/4, or 12/8 time, and expressed in stomp- ing and clapping in the churches and by the rhythm section in jazz, are in general far simpler than in Africa. They tend to form an ostinato (a continuous repeated figure) with a com- parative lack of mutation. A high degree of complexity, how- ever, enters with the factor of free and continuous voice im- provisation that characterizes Afro-American music, for this introduces complex and changing overrhythms. This is clearly Scarborough, Dorothy: On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs. Cambridge, Mass.: 1923. 35 shining trumpets CHAPTER % shown in the notation of a section from a recorded spiritual, I Am a Soldier in the Army of My Lord. 7 (See Ex. 48, back of book.) The same principle of free rhythmic-melodic improvisation over rhythmic ostinato prevails in instrumental jazz. It is much more systematized than in the church singing and demonstrates the close nexus between this music and that of West Africa. The survivals are inner. They might be considered merely symbolic were they not functioning parts of the music as well as tendencies that survived in the whole body of Afro-American music up to, and including, jazz. There is, first, the basic rhythm in which the percussive sec- tion of the band functions like the drums in Africa. Above this, cornet, trombone, and clarinet are conceived of as voices and are played with the vocal tone that, significantly, the Negro imparts to the brass and reeds. Although, as in some African music, a continuous polyphony has superseded the antiphonal process of call (or statement) and answer, the roles of leader and chorus can still be determined. The cornet part is always called lead in New Orleans, the cornetist (or trumpeter) is al- most invariably the actual leader of the band. Like the African leader, he sets the tempo and enunciates the commanding lead phrases. Around his part, the trombone and the characteristic clarinet play (actually sing) melodic parts that function al- most precisely as the choral parts do in African singing when these parts have flowed out over the lead arid antiphony has changed into polyphony. From the nature of the tone, as well as from the melodic character of each, it is clearly evident that a mixed chorus is represented by these two instruments. The trombone represents the male singers ; the clarinet, the female. All that is lacking, theoretically, in the imaginative recon- stitution of this music of the African chorus with drum group are the all-important elements of inner-rhythms and over- rhythms. These elements, which in Africa are found mainly iri the drumming, are, in fact, not lacking in jazz or any Afro- 7 See Appendix G, p. 355, for a detailed analysis of the record. 36 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA American music. They are, however, introduced in a different way. In the rhythmic ostinato of the foot-stomping and hand- clapping of church singing or in the rhythm section (various combinations of drums, guitar, bass, and piano) of the jazz band, we find either a single rhythm characteristically estab- lished and maintained or rhythmic superimpositions of the simplest nature, as syncopated 2/4 over regularly accented 4/4. Complex rhythmic counterpoint enters with the voices or the horns, 8 which provide overrhythms in either or both of two ways. The first of these is in free improvisation, which includes, besides melodic, an equally wide range of rhythmic variation. This is the secret of the complexity of Afro-American rhythms : the improvisational quality carries the African principle of rhythmic mutation to its ultimate point. The second way in which one rhythm is superimposed upon another is the stomp pattern of jazz, in which one or two of the horns concur in tied, syncopated rhythmic figures that produce an overrhythm with the fixed ostinato of the rhythm section. The sequences of poly- rhythms in African drumming give over-all repeated patterns. These arise from the unisons and divergences of the several parts. The stomp pattern in jazz is an evolved and highly learned ipanif estation in which the net result of rhythmic coun- terpoint, rather thari its separate parts, is introduced into in- strumental jazz. Highly significant is the elaborate and subtle symbolism by which the horns in jazz function both as voices and as drums. We shall find the same functional symbolisms in barrel-house, boogie-woogie and ragtime piano music. In these, as in the Afro- American work-songs, spirituals, and jazz, there is a separa- tion of voice from percussive rhythm and a combination of the two in rhythmic counterpoint. In the piano styles, the left hand, or bass, provides a rhythmic ostinato with a minimum of im- provisation ; the right hand presents a more or less improvised impersonation both of drums and of choral voices. s In jazz terms, horns include cornet or trumpet, trombone, and clarinet or saxophones. 37 shining trumpets CHAPTER 9 Jazz is so distantly evolved from West African choral music that these correspondences parts, really, of a continuity of cultural tradition go unperceived. It is difficult to find any- where a tradition deeper or more stubborn than that of Af- rican music. It has retained its essential forms and its vigor through more than three centuries of independent development on an alien continent, throughout a progressive racial dilution. It has done so despite the wholesale adoption by the exiled Negro of white musical material and social customs. The result is a transformation of such material into a music of Western melody recast and rendered in the African techniques. Thus, it is neither African, European nor a hybrid of the two. To attempt to interpret it as either, is to fail to describe its real nature. Correct analysis, which separates material from warmer, indicates this real nature and furnishes the technical basis for calling Afro-American music a new phenomenon in musical history. Multiple repetition of the same note, with or without rhyth- mic variations, is a tendency in Negro singing and in jazz trumpet playing. This type of ostinato or broken pedal-point 9 probably is a tendency in West African music. Kolinski's an- alysis shows it as a characteristic in 71 per cent of the Dahomey and 54 per cent of the Ashanti songs which he examined. Afro-American music very seldom uses triple meters (3/4, 6/4, etc.) in its basic rhythm. The duple meter (2/4, 4/4 etc.) is characteristic as it is in much West African music. Thus, when the European dance tunes heard in New Orleans began to be taken over into the repertory of dancing jazz in about 1885 or 1890, the triple meters were converted into duple. We have a documented example of this in the transformation of a French quadrille into the famous Tiger Rag. (See Chapter 8.) In this process the triple-metered waltz and mazurka sections are changed to common (4/4) time. Complexity develops, as we have shown, with the entry of An unbroken pedal-point is a single note held a long time. 38 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA inner-rhythms and overrhythms. In Afro-American music these occur most frequently in oppositions of odd-numbered to even- numbered meters. We frequently find the type of odd against, or within, even meter in the blues, jazz, and Afro-American piano music. In boogie-woogie, for example, many passages are best scored in 12/8 (or 12/16) instead of the apparent 4/4, the 12/16 falling into four groups of three notes each. For an example of this, see the score of Jimmy Yancey's Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, Ex. 16, back of book. The odd-numbered rhythms withm an even-numbered one are found extensively in Dahomean music, where the 12/8 time signature is equally use- ful in removing the unintelligibility of a 4/4 designation. Great flexibility obtains within the African system while, at the same time, the general formal requirements are well defined. We encounter marked independence between percussion and part singing which, however, does not exceed the limits for- mally set. In Afro- American music, as we shall see, such flex- ible formation clearly enters the form called the blues and op- erates in jazz with the greatest freedom and the most intelligible clarity. Consideration of salient rhythmic characteristics from Af- rica can conclude with the phenomenon loosely known as per- petudL syncopation. Technically, this extended displacement of normal accent is called an of -beat ostmato. In its simplest form, in African and in all Afro-American music, it consists of the displacement of the two accents of 4/4 time to the normally weak beats, the second and fourth, sometimes called off-beats. The example shows normally accented 4/4 and an off-beat 0*- tmato in the same meter. (See Example 1.) Actually, this is not an inner-rhythm because inner-rhythms use shifted accents, with or without tacit beats, to form a dif- ferent pattern within the basic meter. It is, instead, a time-shift of the basic metric pattern it self . A psychological factor enters in the fact that, in the case of a single rhythm like that of one drum, if such a shift continues past a certain point "the placing 39 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 of the measure division tends to shift, the counting is advanced and the off-beat becomes the principal beat." 10 This phenom- enon is adroitly used in African music and in Afro-American forms, particularly ragtime and boogie-woogie, where the nor- mal is restored just before the shift of attention occurs. Such manipulations show accurate, practical knowledge of the quan- tum of time-lag involved. Because the exciting and stimulat- ing quality of extended syncopation is desired, we find African and American Negroes circumventing the difficulties involved by making the perpetual syncope one part only of a poly- rhythm. Thus, the displaced beat is used as overrhythm above the basic, normally accented meter which holds the unshifted meter in the focus of attention. This device, very effective in a rhythmic way, depends upon different timbre as well as pitch range as between the two parts. Examples 2, 3, and 4 (back of book) show ways in which this is accomplished in Africa and in this country. The remarkable strength and purity of rhythmic survival in 1 the American Negro is shown in the following record made early in 1946. CITATION 1. Drum Improvisation^ No. 1. 9 by Baby Dodds. This solo, by the greatest drummer in jazz history, was pro- duced in a state that definitely resembled possession. The full complement of jazz percussion, bass and snare drums, torn toms, wood blocks, cowbell and cymbals, is utilized in an amaz- ingly complex and polyrhythmic improvisation. The drums are meticulously tuned to intervals that correspond to those of Af- rican singing and the performance is at times as complex as that of the three-piece African battery. It must be emphasized, moreover, that Dodds has no first-hand knowledge of African drumming and music. He thinks of himself, on the contrary, as a "modern" jazz drummer and evolves all of his effects directly from the unconscious. 10 Rudi Blesh: TMs is Jazz, Lectures at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1943. (This is a phenomenon somewhat similar to various types of optical illusion and the seeing of complementary hues during color fatigue.) 40 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA Tempo is properly considered in connection with rhythm. Moderate tempo and fixed beat are basically characteristic of African and Afro- American music. 11 Overfast tempos did not appear in Afro-American music until very recently, and then by way of certain types of swing music. It seems obvious that the moderate tempo is desirable because of playing for long periods (often in the heat or when using the music with work or dancing) and, also, because rhythmic as well as melodic counterpoint is more transparent (i.e. intelligible) and therefore more effective at moderate speed. A psychological corollary of the fixed beat, especially in rhythmically exciting music, is a tendency to gradual accelera- tion. We see this operating in the music of both hemispheres when it is not tied to a limiting function such as work. It is equally true of jazz used for dancing. The impulse toward a fixed beat seems as strong, or nearly as strong, as that toward acceleration. Much of the inner tension of African drumming, and of jazz, arises from this fact and is a practical example of the proverbial irresistible force and the immovable object. Later we shall see that, in j azz, the build-up of urgent tensions through the restraint of natural momentum takes the place of the climax in European music. Because of these opposing tendencies, it is almost invariably true that in Negro music everywhere, when acceleration occurs, it is gradual and controlled. It is fair to say that rhythmic variety in European music often derives largely from the use of rubato and tempo changes in their widest sense, while Negro music, holding a strict beat, avoids monotony by rich and complex polyrhythms and because of the principle of constant change of pattern. Particularly in Dahomey 12 we find a complex polyphony de- veloped from the overlapping calls-and-responses of part-sing- ing as well as from the severe limitation of harmony which is not allowed to become predominant. We shall find this type of po- 11 For a specific example Ballanta (Music of the African Races) describes Yoruban music as being characterized by its moderate speed. 12 Vide Kolinski, ibid. 41 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 lyphony and limited harmonic procedure in jazz, originating from the Negroid performance of European melodic material. The vocal vibrato is carried over from Africa into Afro- American singing. Its characteristic use in jazz in the playing of the cornet, trombone, and clarinet has been the subject of much comment. The American Negro employs the vibrato in his own way. As he uses it, controlled and extraordinarily broad, it fulfills two functions. It is a rhythmic device that often fur- nishes, in its timed oscillations, an inner-rhythm within the con- tinuous tones. Beyond that, it is an intonative device used to produce regular variations in pitch. These variations, often as broad as a half-tone, produce the coloration of tone known as blue. The West African languages are tonal, and much of their vocabulary is built on variations in the vowel sounds, just as in Chinese. These tonal qualities with their variations are car- ried together with speech rhythms over into drumming and singing, ultimately for their expressive qualities but pri- marily with the actual lingual meanings. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with what vestigial meanings such timbres have gone over into jazz. Nevertheless, in blues and in jazz any sensitive listener becomes aware that overtones of meaning persist in the timbre and are communicated from Ne- gro player and singer to Negro listener. Such verbal meanings, attenuated but actual, subsist in Af- rican drumming, persist in the foot and hand ostinati of the spirituals, in the plangent percussion of boogie-woogie, and in the rhythm section of the jazz band. African drums speak in two ways and in two directions : they call the gods, and the gods, responding, speak through them. These instruments, tuned with meticulous accuracy and played with sure and complex rhythm, set the air vibrating in pleading or in authority, with the tones and the sequential time-patterns of human or divine speech. Similarly, when those possessed in ritual speak with tongues* we have a supernal language. These strange, often guttural, sounds are unforgettable when once heard. Thousands of miles 42 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA from Africa, one can recognize the same cryptic tones and phrases in Louis Armstrong's jazz playing and singing and in the rapt, unconscious responses of his devotees when both are sent out of this world. In many West African tongues the ad- jective hot refers to the mysterious trancelike state of posses- sion, to the heated and inspired improvisation and the tonal qualities evoked at such a time, to the exciting over-all tonal- rhythmic texture of the music, and the emotional state which is superinduced. All of these meanings persist in Negro language throughout the Western Hemisphere. Their descriptive quality is too unique and their reference too varied to permit the be- lief of any but an African origin of the terms. African music and the Afro- American music which preceded jazz are both, in the main, vocal. Jazz, as we shall see, refers to these antecedents in the highly vocalized tone quality with which the melody instruments are played. It has been assumed that this characteristic timbre arises from the self-taught nature of the Negroes 5 performance on European instruments. How- ever, since vocal tone in a trombone is not the natural tone of this brass instrument but is, rather, an artful manipulation, such reasoning would seem to be inaccurate. If one pictures the Negro as following his own choral tradi- tion and as singing on these instruments, the behavior pattern becomes clear. The impression of vocalization is so strong, and the feeling of polyphonal choral work so pervasive in a New Orleans jazz band, that I shall frequently refer to the cornet, trombone, and clarinet as voice instruments. The musical tonal African quality in the speech of both Negroes and whites is found in the American South. Here again is a point, now tenuous but one which later study may well prove to be a cultural carry-over from the African to the English speech of the Negro, which acted in time as an acculturative in- fluence upon the white man. When the lingual characteristics of Negro speech are sepa- rated and analyzed, and their formative entry into his music made clear, it will be obvious that this music is a language with 43 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 its own communicative qualities. One can then refer without mysticism to its power to convey, through an abstract and de- rivative phonetics an abstruse, inner syntax recondite meanings generally obscured in the written or spoken word. An important element of Negro tonal production is in the attack and termination. Western practice (except, by necessity, on the piano) in order to ensure accurate pitch and pure tone, attacks or initiates the tone somewhat more softly and then swells its volume. Negro practice is precisely the opposite. Each tone is struck relatively louder and then the volume is dimin- ished and is clipped off sharply at the end. This technique trans- fers percussion to the sung tone and is one of the rhythmic bases of hot tone quality. It is especially obvious in jazz trumpet tone which begins with a bell-like sound before the blowing tone emerges. While, in Western music, we have evolved complex diatonic scales, the scalar concept scarcely enters into African music al- though it is constantly referred to as predominantly pentatonic and hexatonic, i.e., five and six-toned. This arises from the question of pitch as it is based on the five-note interval or pentachord. We shall find the pentatonic compass a factor of great importance in the blues and the jazz of the American Negro. In most primitive musics two notes are fixed in pitch, the first and the fifth intervals in whatever scale is being used. These frequently correspond, as in Afro-Amer- ican music, to the tonic and the dominant, respectively, of our scale and our harmony. We shall see how the Negro in America, adopting our music, chose hymns and other pieces built on a simple tonic-dominant harmony because this sequence and the melodies built on it lend themselves sympathetically to African Negroid treatment. We shall examine the characteristic changes wrought in our scale by pentatonic thinking with the micro- tonal (less than the half-tone of European music) flatting of certain intervals, especially the third and the seventh. With simple scalar thinking, tonality in the sense of dif- ferent scales and the modulation from one to another and 44 shining trumpets DRUMS TO AMERICA modality, i.e., major and minor mode, are of small technical importance with regard to the music itself. Key, in Africa, is nothing more than the placing of a melody to fit the range of the voices. Modulation is unknown there. As we might expect, it is virtually unpractised in all Afro-American music except for the march and dance tunes of several themes which were incorporated in the early jazz and in ragtime. Mode, in Africa, is an amorphous thing. The change from major to minor in our music is effected by the semitonal flatting of the third and seventh intervals of the scale. These are pre- cisely the intervals in all Negro music which are flatted inde- terminately in degrees much less than the necessary half-tone and generally approximating a quarter-tone. These, too, are frequently subjected to glissandi. The effect obtained is that of an extremely haunting and plaintive music which hovers con- tinually between major and minor. This sliding, microtonal flat- ting of the third and seventh is a universal practice in all Afro- American music, and gives the quality known as blue. The intervals themselves are called blue notes. Two records document important points of our discussion of West African music and the survival of its characteristics in the New World. 13 Detailed study of African music emphasizes its strangeness as the product of a culture remote in spirit from our own. Yet, since it has become, through Afro- American music, a part of our culture, it remains a language which we need to learn. No one can truthfully say that African music is crude or barbarous. Although its beauties are as strange and cryptic as those of Gabon sculpture, its beauty will nevertheless unfold to the willing ear and its complexities will become intelligible. Its inmost meanings will reach our consciousness at last, and its driving power will energize our spirits with a part, at least, of the fertile and unflagging creativeness of the African. An 13 These discs, made by Professor Herskovits, are to be found at North- western University and copies are in the Library of Congress. For an analysis, refer to Appendix Q p. 346. 45 shining trumpets CHAPTER 2 ocean's interval, the catastrophe of slavery on alien soil, three centuries of oppression and intermittent effort to stamp out every vestige of "heathen" Africanism, were not enough to pre- vent the Negro's construction of his own music from the ma- terials of ours. As we study this music, from work-song through spiritual to the blues and jazz, we shall begin to perceive a musical edifice profoundly different from ours, one of a strange but meaningful beauty. Seeing it thus, we shall understand that this music, which we have been accustomed to think of as humble folk song, is already important and may well develop into one of the great musical systems of history. 46 3. in southern fields and churches THE SLAVES in America represented a heterogeny of Negroes torn from the autonomous societies of their various tribes, cast into the ocean stream of a barbarous commerce, mixed together at random, and deposited on the shores of an alien continent. In Africa they had had the status of free men, within the limits of tribal government, and the arts of free men : painting, sculpture and, to a very marked degree, music. In America they shared the misery and the nearly intolerable conditions of ser- vitude. These shared conditions effaced the remnants of tribal barriers and created, in effect, a supertribe. The tradition of music as an art, intimately infused into daily life, persisted. If it ceased to be the music of freedom, it became that of freedom remembered or imagined, the expression of life in slavery and its ameliorant. The fact that American Negro music, like the African, is at the core of daily life explains the immemorial African quality of all Negro folk music in this country, if not of the Negro in exile everywhere. However, another fact must be recognized to explain com- pletely such a phenomenal survival. This is the stubbornness of the African character, not only in Africa but on alien soil, and through racial dilution even to the evolution of a new physical type. 1 This character persists in spite of the unusual adapta- bility of the Negro to foreign influences. It is at its purest, the most Negro, where the transplanted black man is kept ignorant i See Herskovits, Mdville J.: The American Negro. New Yorki 1980. 47 shining trumpets CHAPTER 8 and isolated from surrounding society, as in slavery. It becomes less purely Negro in proportion to the degree of his assimila- tion. It will, perhaps, always retain a Negroid character, not only because the art of the Negro is different in character from other arts, but more basically still, because a strong case may be made out for the belief that the Negro is different physically and psycKologically, from other peoples. (See Appendix D, p. 349.) Anyone who has watched the Negro in athletics or in ballet is aware of the different quality of his movements. Psychologi- cally, too, he is different in a great many of his reactions. Where he speaks characteristically in ellipsis, for example, and with double meanings, he is not evading the issue. Instead, he is pre- senting it, more complexly than we, in various meanings and from various points of view, simultaneously as it were. And his power of direct communication 'beyond the spoken word is vital and unatrophied. From the first "twenty negars" which John Smith bought at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, to the end of slavery (the last slave came to America in 1864), the lot of the black man iri America was work. The white owner may have delayed the con- ferment of his religion upon the slave but the imposition of his labor was instantaneous. The slave thus found his store of work- music, remembered from Africa, useful and necessary in his new surroundings. The functional principle of this music, to heighten energy, to facilitate physical motion by making it rhythmic, and to furnish mental diversion without interrupting labor, he found applicable here. Work-music, in effect, con- verts labor, at least to a degree, into games or dances that fur- nish an excitement monotonous drudgery cannot. Excitement heightens energy that, channeled into a pattern that excludes non-useful movements, generates its own momentum and ex- pends itself with" little waste. The whole implication of game or dance diverts the worker's mind from his troubles. The hyp- notic singing becomes the reality ; the work becomes automatic. Some of the African types of work-song doubtless were di- rectly applicable to the new labor while others were usable with shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS modification. The Negro, with his musical creativeness, made new types where needed even before he had access to our music .and to our religion. The Afro-American work-songs, therefore, preceded Afro-American religious music and, in their early stages, represented purely African material. Thus the cruel labor of slavery had the accidental effect of preserving musical Africanisms. Preserved, they entered into the Negro folk musics that followed, and gave a treatment and profoundly African form to the extensive European material they included. The work-songs shaped the spiritual ; without them both, the blues and jazz almost certainly would never have evolved. The markedly eclectic character of American Negro essays in other arts, such as painting and sculpture, is partly explain- able by the hiatus or time-lag which fortunately did not in- tervene in the Negro creation of music. The slave masters ap- proved all music-making that aided work or diverted leisure. This approval was opportunistic without implications of aes- thetic approval or understanding. There was no approval at all of Negro sculpture and painting, no desire to collect it even the curio craze had not as yet seized the American public nor to use it decoratively in the home. Not until 1906 were Picasso and Matisse to rescue some dust-covered pieces of Af- rican sculpture from Paris second-hand stores, their vision, sharpened by spiritual need, penetrating the strangeness as de- cisively as it penetrated the dust, to reach the enigmatic mean- ing, the cruel and powerful beauty beneath. They found this beauty and meaning, which were to exert so formative an in- fluence on twentieth century painting and sculpture, in the junk-heap remains of the work of black men long dead on a far continent, an influence cabalistic and magical emanating Darkly and secretly from artifacts. Music had been commonly practiced among all the African tribes, danced and drummed in a daily heated improvisation in which all the members of the tribe participated. Sculpture, and painting too, may have been created spontaneously, but once a piece was created it had a permanent, unchanging form; al- shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 though used with music in magic-making or ceremonial, it was a realized object about which the whirling chemical tides of sound could crystallize. Too, sculpture and painting are solitary occupations, executed by specialists as it were ; unlike music, the communal use of these art products followed their creative fash- ioning. In America the Negro, with no immediate need for sculp- ture and painting, did not create objects that, unlike the music that crossed the ocean in his memory and in the habits of his heart, he necessarily had left behind in Africa. 2 Early comment on slave music is sparse but occasionally sig- nificant. Thomas Jefferson, in 1784, for example, wrote 3 "In music they [the Negroes] are more generally gifted than the whites, with accurate ears for a tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. . . . The in- strument proper to -them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." Besides the great Virginian's brief but discerning observation on Negro improvisational and rhythmic skill, another eighteenth century note exists which applies to the creation of antiphonal work-songs in America. This is to be found in Parkes 9 Travels* They lightened their labour by songs, one of which was com- posed extempore for I was myself the subject of it. It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chorus : The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words were these : Leader : The winds roared and the rains fell, The poor white man, faint and weary, Came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, No wife to grind his corn. 2 "During afternoons of serene weather, men, women, girls, and boys are allowed while on deck to unite in African melodies which they always enhance by an extemporaneous tom-tom on the bottom of a tub or tin kettle." Quoted by Lydia Parrish (in Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: 1942) from Captain Canot, or Twenty Tears of an African 8laver (1827- 1847). In Notes on Virginia. * Quoted in Carres Musical Journal (1801) Vol. 2, 50 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS Chorus : Let us pity the white man, No mother has he! Let us pity the white man, No wife has he! Despite such contemporary comment, specific technical knowledge of American Negro music from the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries is almost nonexistent. There exist, indeed, more definite data concerning African mu- sic of the same period. Yet the process of development is clear, even if the original form of the work-music is largely unknown except by inferential reference to that of appropriate West African areas. It stemmed from Africa directly and without a time lapse. Its purity and its function combined to keep it more free from hybridization and dilution than church music which began by adapting Anglo-American melodic and harmonic ma- terial. Yet even church music today is remarkably African in form and manner. This African spirit and tradition, preserved through the work-song, and transmitted through the spiritual, is alive today in the blues and jazz and, more generally still, as a creative musical potentiality. Slavery made possible the creation of American Negro folk music and the art-form, jazz, but this fact furnishes no con- donement of slavery or any phase of it. Any praise to be de- duced is praise of the invincible spirit and courage of men of any color, of the unquenchable human need to find beauty and o produce art even in the midst of the most intolerable and in- human conditions. It is praise not of "man's inhumanity to man," but of his refusal to be degraded under the blows of insensate cruelty. It is praise, not of Pharaoh, but of Moses who goes down and sets "my people free." One might speculate on the Afro-American music which would surely have developed had the Negroes come here with social and political equality. One might wish that they had been free to develop artistically, unconditioned by social pressures, with- 51 sJiining trumpets CHAPTER 3 out needing to seek social equality through, the imitation of white men. 5 The work-songs survived Emancipation because the Negroes were not freed thereby from a virtual labor conscription which still exists in parts of the South. Ironically, it was the machine which later, began to free the Negroes from the sort of com- munal labor that naturally gives rise to, and perpetuates, the work-song. Economic logic found the counterpart of the slave in the machine. Both can be owned, can be bought and sold ; food or fuel, preservation of health or mechanical maintenance, are equally necessary protections of investment. So machinery came and the work-songs began to die out. There finally remains the double irony that the work-song has survived virtually in prison only. Prisoners, like slaves, must work but need not be paid; only the minimum requirements of life need be provided. And in the prisons of the South, with their preponderance of Negro inmates, in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Texas, are to be found most of the surviving work-songs. Elsewhere, we can hear the Afro-American work-song today only in a rare and sporadic group survival and in the singing of a few individuals, like the fabulous character, Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter). Recorded work-music is recent and not extensive. John and Alan Lomax have recorded, in various penitentiaries and prison farms of the South, a number of examples for the Library of Congress Folk Archives. Among the prison recordings, the following shall be cited: CITATION 2. Jumpin' Judy, sung by Kelly Pace and Group at Cumins State Farm, Gould, Arkansas, (1934). This ax- chopping song, recorded during actual work, is almost com- pletely African in musical form, in timbre, and in spirit. Over the ostinato of the ax blows, which function musically like drum s Not even in Africa has the Negro been left free to pursue his own' arts "without interference. Douglas H. Varley writes in the preface of his African Native Music, "While one group of well-meaning workers has attempted to impose a European cast on native singing, another group from Misionar Witte to the Rev. A. M. Jones has collected important evidence and attempted to work out a logical compromise which takes into account native tone-values, form and .rhythm." 52 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS percussion, the leader calls and the chorus responds in the con- secutive thirds characteristic of West Africa. The responses rise and fall on an undulant melodic line almost precisely as on the Dark Continent. With the freedom of some African singing, the chorus shouts approval and comment on the leader's im- provised lines and responds to his bitter irony. Jumpin 9 Judy should be compared directly with a portion of Manbetu Song from the Belgian Congo. (See Ex. 5, back of book.) The basic similarity of these surpassingly beautiful songs, one sung by convicts in Arkansas, the other by a tribal group in West Africa, is evident even in our musical score so ill- adapted to indicating African music. CITATION 3. Long Hot Summer Days, sung by Clyde Hill and Group at Clemens State Farm, Brazoria, Texas, (1939). This is beyond question one of the most hauntingly beautiful of all recorded work-songs. Although the harmony is clearly European, its whole character is greatly modified in an African way by the extreme portamento of the singers and by the in- cessant numes or quavering downward figures, mainly around the diminished third and seventh intervals. Long Hot Summer Days is closely related to church singing and its effect is that of a solemn, devotional requiem. Through these moving, ma- jestic choral sequences one can hear the dark depths of bitter- ness, frustration, and vain regret in the hearts of imprisoned men. Another record from the Library of Congress Archives, Long John, is of special interest because of its similarity to Negro children's songs. (See Appendix E, p. 351.) The records cited above typify the choral work-song that evolves in group labor. The foreman, as a rule, is the leader in this singing that, regardless of melodic derivation, so clearly exemplifies the African call-and-response antiphony. "The holler is the work-song of solitary occupation. The cowboys 'hollered' at their cattle to keep them moving or to quiet them at night; lumberjacks, to let the world know an- other big tree was coming down ; field hands, to relieve the lone- 53 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 liness of their plowing. This habit of hollering has particularly marked the American Negro at work. On the levees, in the cotton field, on the railroad, he has hollered and moaned his troubles and his observations on the ways of the world. The holler is a way of singing free gliding from a sustained high note down to the lowest register the singer can reach, often ending there in a grunt." 6 The Negro hollers originally had specific musical forms to fit specific occupations, as well as names to fit each. A few of these names have survived sporadically. An example is the name, arwhoolie, for the cornfield holler. Among recorded ex- amples of hollers are, Don't Mind the Weather, Diamond Joe, and Joe the Grinder (Library of Congress AAFS-16), Ar- whoolie, Quittiri* Time Songs, and Mealtime Call (Library of Congress AAFS-37). Among the finest Negro work-songs recorded outside of the prisons are those sung by Lead Belly, self-styled "King of the twelve-string guitar players of the world. 55 Huddie Ledbetter was born in 1885 in western Louisiana, near the Texas line and only thirty miles north of the large gulf coast city of Shreve- port. Lead Belly never forgot the work-songs, ballads, play- party and dance songs of his people, which he learned as a coun- try boy. Later in life, he had long hours in the penitentiary to play and sing them over and over, expanding and varying them with his own genius in the immemorial way that folk music grows. Pardoned dramatically after singing for the governor of Louisiana, Lead Belly has since become an outstanding na- tional folk artist. He plays and sings the work-songs, ballads, dance-songs, and blues with an artistry of the highest order, his work animated with his dynamic, almost hypnotic, magnetism. CITATION 4. 0V Riley, sung by Lead Belly with accompani- ment by his own twelve-string guitar. Also known as In dem Long Hot Summer Days, this song is a work holler and, at the same time, a ballad of the epic or Lomax, John A. and Alan: Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly* New York: 1936. 54 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS legendary type. It is of great beauty and its melodic line is mobile, expressive, and of a marked African rhythm. (See Ex. 6, back of book.) Identified here with the Brazos River in Texas, it may go back as far as slavery days with OP Eiley, the legendary hero, typifying in his speed and prowess the un- quenchable spirit of the Negro, and in his escape foreshadow- ing his eventual deliverance from slavery and oppression. 7 Lead Belly sings slowly like a narrator : Ol 9 Rttey walked de 'water In dem long hot summer days. OF Riley he's gone OV Rlley lie's gone, gone, gone In dem long hot summer days. OV Rlley left here walJcin 9 In dem long hot summer days. Faster, as if descriptive of the chase, the guards call the dogs; Here Rattler, here Rattler, here Rattler, here Here Rattler, here Rattler, here Rattler, here. OV Riley's gone like a turkey through the corn Here, Rattler, here OV Riley*s gone like a turkey through the corn Here, Rattler, here. Rattler come when I blow my horn Here, Rattler, here Oh, the Rattler come when I How my horn Here, Rattler, here. Too-oo -toot-too Here, Rattler, here Toot, toot, toot Here, Rattler, here. Slowly once more as if Riley has escaped and the guards are returning reluctantly : 7 Like Run, Nigger, Run, a slavery-time song and one of the early planta- tion type. 55 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 Ol 9 Riley walked de water Ol 9 Riley walked de water In dem long hot summer days. Ol 9 Riley Tie's gone ' Or Riley he's gone gone gone gone. Fast and soft and far away : Here Rattler, here Here Rat tier , here. In Lead Belly's singing, this dramatic, if sketchy, ballad has become a sort of nostalgic tone poem. The singer seems content to forget the bitterness of prison and to sing a song of summer in the South. The dramatic old song emerges from the singer's memory as a thing of soft and lyrical tenderness, a tonal evoca- tion of a drowsy summer day. It is like a dream dreamed on the warm grass, in a cottonwood's shade at the busy field's edge, a dream of something that happened long ago. What was it? A slave's escape? A convict's escape? I remember only a few words of the old song I sing for you, nothing of what it means. Into the dream come distantly, secretly, the voices of workers, the barking of dogs, the call of a horn all the sounds of summer day, multiplex and gentle, drifting down slower than rain, re- mote, muted, soft as the air. In Take This Hammer (Asch No. 101), a steel-drilling song sung by Lead Belly, the verse formation, with its serial groups of three identical verses followed by an answering refrain, is strongly antiphonal. In this sort of song, the leader might sing the verse, the group responding with the refrain. From the functional aspect, the tempo is important in regulating the pace of the labor which would be steady and, presumably, as leisurely as the "straw boss" would permit. Lead Belly sings with strong African rhythm and timbre, and characteristic use of long sliding tones. The unaccompanied calls and street cries constitute a distinct type of work-song, one that has remained very African in form. 56 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS Their melody, pure and free from considerations of harmony, is declaimed and chanted; it follows the distinctly African formula of developing melody from the rhythms, inflections, and timbres of spoken language. As in the native tongues, the melody of the calls and the street cries is colored by the tone qualities of language and moves with spoken rhythms ; the me- lodic line rises and falls, or fluctuates on a single tone with the free characteristics of speech. On the Mississippi, this sort of melodic call or chant was de- veloped by the Negro calling the depth soundings to the river- boat pilot. The sounding call is distinctly different from the river chanty sung by a group. The following is a fine example. CITATION 5. Heaving the Lead Line, called by Sam Hazel, Greenville, Mississippi, (1939). The voice sounds like a horn blown far off in the fog around the river bend. The undulant melody rises and falls. We can trace the ancient history of lan- guage, of language become poetry and of poetry become song, in the simple, called numbers, poetic evocations of the great river. (See Ex. 7, back of book.) Tell Tne there's a buoy, a "buoy right on the bar The light is twisted and you can see just how. Pull a little over to the larboard side. Lawd, Lawd. Quarter less twain, Quarter less twain 9 Lawd 9 Lawd, now send me quarter less twain. Throw the lead line a little higher out. One remembers the origin of Samuel Clemens' pseudonym, remembers that he found his pen-name while he piloted river boats on the Mississippi. One night in moonlight or in fog, he listened to the wild, rich Negro voice blending with sounds of water, chanting the depths as the line was heaved: I've gone low down, so mark twain, Mark twain. Perhaps the most familiar form of work-chant is the vendors 5 street cry, which is almost universal throughout the United 57 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 States ; the cry of the scissors grinder and the wagon peddler in New York's streets, the call of the newsboy in the Middle West, and everywhere in the "rags and bottles" of the junkman. The Negro in the South has carried the development of these street cries to their highest point in our country. They are heard everywhere below the Mason-Dixon line. Those of Charles- ton, South Carolina, are perhaps the most famous. Some of these, fortunately, have been recorded there. (See Appendix F, p. 353.) These calls show clearly the Negro's conversion of speech into song. This tendency seems to be changing even the con- versation of the Negro into a sort of singing. They exhibit also, a typically African variety of rhythm, abounding in syn- copations, displaced accents, and anticipations and retardations of the basic beat. Finally, these cries are rich in tonal qualities, in variety and in variation of timbre, and in the vocal-instru- mental tone quality we find in jazz. They prophesy New Or- leans jazz as clearly as they recall Africa. Strangely enough, dancing, an activity universal among Af- rican Negroes, tended for a long time to be suppressed in this country. Undoubtedly, abandonment of the more uninhibited of the African dances was brought about by the slave-owners almost immediately. In other cases dances disappeared with the banning of the appropriate tribal activity or ceremonial. Many rituals and social diversions, inextricably connected in Africa with dancing and music, were objectionable to the slave-owners. Not only an activity as obviously dangerous as the war dance, which might be considered destructive of the servile spirit, but all dances of a communal type were naturally suspect as aiding potential self-organizing of the slaves. Organization might be expected to become, in their hands, a weapon of flaming revolt. The Negroes, in point of historical fact, refused widely and stubbornly to accept bondage. Slave revolts were frequent and bloody, yet no more so than the abuses which caused them. De- spite the stereotype of the kindly, paternalistic plantation owner (a type that did, of course, exist to a degree), appalling 58 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS inhumanities, often motivated by uneasy fear and by suppressed feelings of guilt, were all too frequent. Over a period of more than two hundred years (1663-1865) there were, according to Aptheker, 8 no less than one hundred and thirty uprisings. In the imposition of their religion, the slave-owners found a ready-made instrument for taming and diverting their human property. The Christian religion, which eschewed dancing long ago 9 and came to condemn it as an evil secularism, led the con- verted slaves to a self -censorship of their natural activity. 10 Especially significant is the reference here to French and Spanish tolerance, precisely the condition to be found in New Orleans where African dancing was allowed during, and long after, slavery. That fresh slaves were constantly being brought to this coun- try is a fact which bears on the continued strength and purity of African influence in all Afro- American music. Each boat- load poured a new infusion into the slowly diluting stream of native Negro inspiration. This largely explains not only the persistence of African form, method and spirit, but the sudden recrudescence from time to time of expressions like the dance. Some of the earliest forms of secular slave dances have been preserved. A well-known one is Juba, which some writers be- lieve to be an authentic African melody. Miss Scarborough 11 gives a version of this dance-song which is a severe, oversimpli- fied, and non-Negroid notation. (See A in Ex. 8, back of book.) As Negroes would sing and play it in their native rhythmic manner, syncopating and displacing accents, it would vary endlessly. (See B in Ex. 8.) s Aptheker, Herbert: American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: 1943. Havelock Ellis points out that dancing by priests or laity actually went on in European churches up to the eighteenth century (The Dance of Life). 10 "This ban on dancing was set up, not by the white masters, but by the Negroes themselves, or by their religious leaders. The dances that the cap- tured slaves brought over with them from Africa were heathen and obscene, and so they must be 'laid aside' in the new- life. They were permitted, with certain restrictions, in the sections under Latin influence French and Span- ish but not elsewhere." (Scarborough, Dorothy: On the Trail of Negro Folk- songs, op. cit.j p. 97.) 11 Ibid. p. 98. 59 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 Juba illustrates the simple harmony which the Negroes ex- tracted from the Anglo-American hymns as the only harmonic base required for their complex and ceaseless melodic, tonal and rhythmic variations. The melodic character of this dance and the call-like statement followed by the last two-measure re- sponse, clearly hark back to the African call-and-response and are strongly prophetic of the later eight-bar blues form. Sim- ilarly the Calinda survived in New Orleans, on the Georgia Sea Islands, and elsewhere. Lead Belly provides a number of fine examples of the rural folk dance in vocal form with guitar accompaniment. Two ex- amples, full of a pastoral poetry, are Green Corn 12 (Musicraft No. 225 and Asch No. 5612) a fiddle sing for square dancing and Corn Bread Rough (Asch No. 101), a reel with accordion accompaniment. Thus the Negro began to create in America, as he had done in Africa, a body of musical types intimately connected with his daily life, evolved from and used with different parts of the new pattern of living. The Negro had religion here, although it was a new one. What remained from his African faiths we can, in the main, only guess. Yet the tendency of primitive peoples to amalgamate their own religious rites and customs with, and to conceal them within, the new dogma and ritual, is well known. Equally well known is the tendency of the missionary, or the indigenous church, to tolerate and condone these duplicities (even creating festivals to correspond with pre-existent pagan ones) in the long view that envisions over-all and gradual conversion. So, from the African work-songs of three hundred years ago, the Negro took his next step. The spirituals, which soon began to resound in the open fields and to rock the bare, wooden coun- try churches, were the first music definitely to transform Eu- 12 "Lead Belly always sings this old-fashioned air tenderly and joyfully, as if softly and pleasantly drunk on green-corn whiskey just off the mash. A feeling of spring runs through the song, the sound of sappy fodder rustling in a June wind; and each repetition of 'green corn' is like a young corn sprout pushing up through the brown earth." Lomax, John A. & Alan: Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly. New York: 1936.) 60 sfiining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS ropean melody by African rendition, the first music, in short, clearly Afro-American. The spiritual which, with its offspring, the blues, was the first Negro music to elicit general white praise, is the fountainhead of racial inspiration from which jazz was to flow. So, in the New World, a body of religious Negro music was created. It was made at certain times and in certain sects to include (as it still does to a considerable degree) dancing, which also continued to be carried on as an activity separate from the church. Hurry Angel hurry! Hurry down to the pool. I want you to trouble the water this momin* To bathe my weary soul. Angel got two wings to veil my face, Two wings to fly away. Early in the mornin\ 'bout the break of day Two angels came from heaven and rolled the stone away. Angel got two wings to veil my face Angel got two wings to fly away. I would not be a hypocrite I tell you the reason why 'Cause death might overtake me And I wouldn't be ready to die. Angel got two wings to veil my face Angel got two wings to fly away. 3 - 3 The slavery church did not bring the bright angel of de- liverance the Negro sought. The dark angel came often, de- scending by night and day, for, to natural death and that of exposure and ill-tended disease, was added the appalling rate of suicide and infanticide among the rebellious slaves. Nor did Emancipation bring immediately, or ever wholly, the freedom of political and social equality. But art, to a creative race, is a kind of deliverance ; the opportunity to practice and create it, a kind of freedom. Music was to be this fairer angel, an angel with two wings. One, dark, was African music ; the other, is An old spiritual 61 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 bright, was the melody of the white man ; shielding wings that would veil the black face, bitter symbol and inescapable cause of shame ; wings of deliverance on which to fly away home. This fusion of two musics, as remote as black is from white, came with the spiritual and was to find its greatest expression in jazz. Afro- American music falls into the broad categories, religious and secular 9 or as church Negroes will have the latter, sinful, or worldly. The religious category included, in the beginning, congregational preaching, singing, and dancing, first carried on in the open fields or in the hut villages. This followed a marked African pattern still to be heard in rural, and even in urban, churches where too much sophistication has not crept in. From this congregational singing came the hymn, or spiritual. 14 The secular music included, originally, work-songs, dances, children's games and play-songs. A later development, partly derived from white sources, was the ballad, although, to be sure, there is African' precedent for the chanted narrative and the animal myth. The final development in secular form was the blues, a form of great importance. -As the number of his occupations increased, particularly after slavery, the varieties of Afro- American music grew. With Emancipation, the Negro moved about more, thus spreading the music about. Also, seizing the opportunity for independent employment in music, he became a wandering entertainer, sing- ing and playing the guitar; he became the itinerant "pro- fessor," playing ragtime or barrel-house piano music in drink- ing places, boarding houses, and bordellos ; he became the street evangelist, often blind, preaching and singing on the corners while he played a battered guitar. Along the dusty roads, along the railroad tracks, in the crowded, dirty streets, and on the river boat, the Negro moved, singing and spreading his music as he went. Where, for a third of a century, it had been dis- i* Also called a mellow, a word derived from melody, and, in the Georgia Sea Islands, an an fern from anthem. 62 shining trumpets 'IN SOUTHERN FIELDS seminated in the form of grotesque and inept parody, in a spirit half sympathetic and half contemptuous, by the white minstrel with cork-blackened face, the black man now had the chance himself to circulate and sow his songs, even to form his own minstrel shows and blacken his dusky face to the traditional inhuman ebony. And thus he could laugh although with a deeper humanity at those who had laughed at him. The spirituals, like all Afro-American vocal music, are a part of Negro double-entendre and are full of hidden meanings. If God is presented to the converts as a just God, the Negro, faced with injustice, is appealing to justice when singing of his woes to Him. Singing of Egypt, he sings of slavery ; appealing to Moses, he invokes the genius of his own race. The River is a symbol of many references : the many great streams of Africa and liberation as well as death, so that Beulah Land means freedom as often perhaps as it signifies Heaven. In a very real, if indirect, sense the Negro churches were stations on the under- ground railroad which was being surveyed and built long before it began to carry runaway slaves in the days before the Civil War. Until Emancipation, the spiritual enforced and strength- ened tendencies which, even in Africa, are ingrained in the race. These are to use music as language and to employ speech in a circuitous and double-edged way. Negro speech every- where is indirect and implicative as well as direct ; its reference is many-faceted ; it is universal as well as specific and, in these dualities, it is essentially poetic. "Many elements of the Uncle Remus stories are encountered in the [African] sacred myths, and these elements, even where the animal personnel has been retained, are handled in a subtle . . . manner. They often ex- hibit a double-entendre that permits them to be employed as moralizing tales for children or as stories enjoyed by adults for their obscenity/ 5 15 Slave speech aimed in two directions; disarmingly simple, it was also code. Language, like drums, could conceal messages is Herskovits, Melville J.: The Myth of the Negro Past, op. cit. 63 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 while conveying them. The visitor to New Orleans' Congo Square could watch the African dancing and ceremonial, hear the music. How could the Negro prevent this ? But if he asked for a translation of African words or an interpretation of symbolism, he met a blank wall. These Negroes, many just ar- rived from Africa or Haiti, entering so vividly and knowingly into the proceedings, professed a transparent but impenetrable ignorance as though their activity were only the improvised, idle play of grown-up children, or else an outworn ritual which had ceased to signify anything. From tlie Negro tendency to mytho-poetic creation come the sayings. "In addition to the tales are numerous proverbs and riddles, the former in particular being used at every possible opportunity to make a point in an argument, or to document an assertion, or to drive home an admonition." 16 Making a prom- ise, under duress perhaps, with a secret determination not to keep it, the Louisiana Negro would say, "Lalcwgue napas lezoSy" which is to say, "the tongue has no bones/' "A large majority of negro sayings . . . possess a chameleon power of changing hue according to the manner in which they are placed . . . the art of applying one proverb to many different situations is one in which the negro has no rival." 17 That strange language or patois which takes its name from the Indian flavoring of ground sassafras leaves, the gombo of Louisiana, a mixture of French, Indian and African words, is supposed to have died out. (The original Indian word, gombo, meant the brown earth of the Mississippi prairies.) Yet I have heard and very recently New Orleans jazz players con- verse in fragments of this tongue. This was done partly for secrecy, and it was for this reason that neither English nor French was employed. The Negro everywhere, while poetic, is primarily musical. "Poetry is likewise not lacking [in West Africa] though poetic i Lafcadio Hearn: Gombo Zhebes, 1885. IT Ibid. 64 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS quality derives principally from a rich imagery; the associa- tion of poetry with song, moreover, is so intimate that it is not found as an independent form. 55 1S It is not surprising, there- fore, to find the first Negro poetry in America in the work- songs and spirituals and then in the blues, with literary poetic creation, independent of music, not emerging as a strong Negro activity until a full 300 years after the first slaves came here. The number of spirituals evolved during slavery was im- mense. Their creation was continuous. Any gathering of the devout in a small church, in open air services, or by a riverside for baptism, might see new ones arise in the spontaneous chant- ing of texts. Most were forgotten as soon as sung ; others, re- membered, became standard, although the variants of any one spiritual throughout the South would be almost as numerous as the churches. Only a small proportion actually came directly from white hymns; many were influenced by them; the vast majority sprang from the native Negro creativeness. There is not, for example, only one Swing Low> Sweet Chariot. That sung today is a chance survival. The early version adopted by the Hampton Student Singers, as shown in the 1874 collection of their songs, is entirely different. A title by no means indicates a certain piece of music but is merely a text to which a spiritual has been improvised. J. B. Towe writes of the creation of a spiritual, En Dat Great Gittin*-up Morniri*. The student who brought it to us ... has furnished all that he can remember of the almost interminable succession of verses, which he has heard sung for half an hour at a time, by the slaves in their midnight meetings in the woods. He gives the following interesting account of its origin : "It was made by an old slave who knew nothing about letters or figures. He could not count the number of rails that he would split when he was tasked by his master to split 150 a day. But is Perskovits, Melville J.: The Myth of the Negro Past. op. cit. 65 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 he tried to lead a Christian life, and ho dreamed of the General Judgment . . . and then made a tune to it, and sang it in his cabin meetings." 19 In the early creation of Afro-American music, a tune might perform both secular and religious duty. Many spirituals were used as work-songs. Bright Sparkles in de Churchyard was thus used by hands in the tobacco factories of Danville,, Vir- ginia ; another, / Hope my Mother Will be There, came to be called "The Mayo Boys' Song" in Richmond from its habitual use in the Mayo Tobacco Factory. Before beginning an analysis of the spiritual, we can make a partial list of Negro folk music in America prior to the blues and jazz: Religious: A. Congregational. 1. Preaching with responses. 2. Congregational singing, the spirituals. 3. Singing the spirituals, solo. 4. "Holy" dancing. 5. Ring shouts. B, Street singing, the revivalist. Secular: A. Work-songs, (partial listing) . 1. Plantation and rural (choral), cotton picking hoeing, cotton chopping water songs plowing mule and ox driving chopping sugar cane quitting-time songs 2. Various occupations, (choral), ax chopping (lumbering, etc.) sea chanties river-boat chants levee chanties railroad songs steel work i Quoted in Cabin and Plantation Songs, as sung "by the Hampton Students 1874. 66 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS 3. Various solitary occupations, hollers for many occupations street cries, vendor's chants and songs river-sounding calls B. Dances. square dances, reels fiddle songs cake walks jigs and ragtime struts C. Play-songs, especially children's. kissing games hiding games ring games dancing games lullabies D. Ballads. narrative epic or legendary Fortunately, there exists a considerable body of recorded material from which a study of these Negro folk-music forms may be made. It is very important to hear this music in actual performance or on records, not only because of the great variety in the improvisation but because the music is, from many as- pects, unscoreable. The following records, from the Library of Congress Ar- chives and various commercial recording sources, illustrate various phases of congregational singing and services. CITATION 6. TTie Gambling Man, by Rev. W. M. Mosely and Congregation. This is Negro preacfaiag with spontaneous congregational responses, shouted and db&ntecl^ tearing a direct relation to African antiphony. It is ^ typical example of the participa- tive, spontaneous creation of a complex tonal-rhythmic piece. The preaching flows naturally into singing and, with the re- sponses, is itself music, an improvised and chanted recitative. The preacher's phrases, like "Oh, I wonder where [is] the gamblin* man? " combine with a woman's chorus of high, clear, 67 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 Negroid timbre, that sings, part antiphonally, part polyph- onally, in undulating lines of chain-fourths. Although rhyth- mic and improvisational, the music is not wildly excited but has an eerie, timeless detachment like that in African perform- ance of an established ritual, centuries old. Only the drums are missing. Negro services are notably unostentatious and strongly dem- ocratic, furnishing a free and joyous good time for all. They remind the thoughtful observer of what the earliest Christian services in Rome may have been like when the Christians needed then, as the Negroes have needed in America, to cling almost tribally together, a despised and ostracized minority. The preaching and the prayers are informal and impas- sioned, chanted melodically and rhythmically rather than spoken prosaically. An inspiring section of the service is that given over to testimonials which, whether long and detailed or only a short "Praise the Lord," are followed by the testi- fier's leading off with a spiritual in which the congregation quickly joins with handclapping and singing. It is executed with remarkable effects of rhythm and polyphony, and the fa- miliar moaned or shouted responses, "Amen," "Yes, Lord! 55 and the like. Sometimes the power is so strongly generated and so magnetically communicated that dancing begins quite spon- taneously. Frequently, one sees in the churches the mysterious phe- nomenon of possession which is a frequent concomitant of West African religious rites. With one worshipper, the possessed state comes on gradually ; with another, the seizure may be in- stantaneous. In one case, it resembles a motionless and rigid catalepsy ; in another, the person is vitalized into inspired ac- tion, dancing, singing, or uttering tibt sounds of spiritual pos- session. In such an activity the Negro follows the pattern which has enabled him to avoid the romantic and the sentimental in his artistic creations, the pattern that leads'him to express deep emotion in a catharsis of rhythmic action comprised in sound and movement. 68 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS It would seem to the close observer that the subject's con- sciousness focuses upon a different field or plane of experience than the one we are accustomed to call normal. In cases of ac- tive possession (with dancing, etc.) this new focusing occurs while the subject simultaneously keeps in contact with his sur- roundings. The state of possession might be compared roughly with the print of a photographic double exposure or, more accurately, with the projection of a double-exposed cinema film. During possession, something may occur similar to an in- voluntary suspension of the inner-psychological conflicts of the subject, thus producing a harmonization. This could explain, at least roughly, the refreshed state of the subject when he re- turns from the most active possession to fully resumed use of his normal faculties. Possession, in any event, would seem defi- nitely not to be identified, as it tentatively has been, either with hysteria or mild epilepsy. When active, it leaves intact even seems to heighten physical and mental power and accuracy ; the after-effects are generally observed to be beneficial rather than harmful. I recall vividly an evening service in a San Francisco Negro church where the singing began with hand-clapping and the percussive tinkle of tambourines throughout the congregation* The small and nondescript orchestra 20 participated, and soon numbers of the communicants, adults and children, were danc- ing in the pews and in the aisles. After perhaps ten' minutes, the pastor and, one by one, the elders, began to dance on the platform. The last, a white-haired man, reached under his chair, pulled a fiddle from its case, and began to play while swaying, totteringly but rhythmically. For about twenty minutes the music, like a tidal wave, rose in intensity and fervor. As spon- taneously as it began, the singing stopped, and, joyous and refreshed, the congregation took up the service again. The total impression was that of a vast and vital creativity, rich, august, and powerful, solemn and joyous, wildly reverent and 20 Drums, piano, trumpet, saxophone, guitar, and ukulele 69 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 infinitely tender. Only a complex and deeply serious music could produce such an effect. The following records illustrate this phenomenal sort of com- munity worship and thanksgiving in song. Although recent, they are similar to the singing that went on prior to jazz and may, therefore, be used to trace its origins. Some of them are compared here directly with African records. CITATION 7. I'm Gonna Lift up a Standard -for my King, sung and played by the Congregation of the Church of God and Christ at Moorhead Plantation near Lulu, Mississippi, (1941). (Voices, hand-clapping and guitar, foot-stomping in latter stages.) This truly remarkable record in the store of recorded folk music is typical of the Negro church singing unrecorded throughout America. Its noteworthy qualities are in a norm or average which anyone may hear, on any Wednesday or Sun- day evening, in a thousand humble Negro churches. The re- spectful and interested white spectator is almost always wel- come at these services. This record illustrates holy dancing as well as congregational spiritual singing. A rhythmic, hand-clapped pattern or ostinato on the off- beat is set in the first measure and immediately the surging momentum of perpetual syncopation is released. The singing is free and varied, wild but controlled ; it is chanted chorally, with much unison and octaval coincidence, combined with the freest polyphony into which voices enter at will on varying notes and with sporadic, variant melodic phrases. Notable is the al- most complete lack of harmony. There is a sense of unfolding form evolved unconsciously in a logical and implicit pattern. Episodes develop ; by mutual consent, the momentarily inspired individual is accorded the opportunity for a solo; mutually, the group closes about his last notes with a new communal out- burst. The steady building up of urgency is characteristic. The dancing is clearly portrayed in the episodic arrange- ment. The hymn, probably 16 bars in length, is chanted in full polyphony by the whole congregation, evidently to incite and 70 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS encourage the dancer. Alternating with each of these full chants, the dancer herself sings in a dirty-toned voice, hoarse, expres- sive, exciting, very hot in feeling, and amazingly like a man's voice or the hottest trumpet possible. Her song, wild, urgent, possessed, soaring over the inexorable, beating rhythm, seems to collide in midair with calls, shouts, and exhortations. After a number of these repetitions, building even more urgently in excitement, the singing largely ceases and the dancing goes on to calls and shouts entering irregularly over the rhythm. There is the most gradual and imperceptible acceleration throughout. The amount of control exercised in all this appar- ently wild excitement, is best shown by saying that the music which begins at J 176, ends 21 five minutes later, after a very gradual accelerando, at J = 194. The atmosphere is surcharged with feeling ; it is at once dark and magic, ominous and exultant. The variety of timbres through all the gamut of expressive- ness clear, piercing, *strident, pure, dirty is utterly and remarkably African. As part of the development, the rhythmic pattern grows more complex : the stomping of feet on the floor accents the strong beats (1 and 3) while the hand-clapping (each clap is a quick triplet) becomes duple, striking all beats while accenting the weak ones (2 and 4). This record can be profitably compared with : CITATION 8. Bahutu Songs and Dances, a record made in the Belgian Congo by the Denis-Roosevelt Expedition which pro- duced the memorable film, Dark Rapture. In Section 2 of this record, just as in I'm Gonna Lift up a Standard, a hand-clapped, rhythmic ostiiiato is immediately set up. The ostinato patterns are essentially the same although, in the Moorhead record, they imdeigo a minaber of mutations. There is great similarity, to% in the voeal timbres, although, in the African example, the voices chant in unison and in a set rhythmic pattern with little or no rhythmic interweaving of polyphonic voices. Nevertheless, the Moorhead record derives 21 More accurate: tbe recording ends. These performances often last fifteen to twenty minutes, then stop suddenly with disregard for formal ending. 71 shining trumpets CHAPTER S its polyphony from African sources and not from European music which has had no comparable polyphony for centuries. I'm Gonna Lift up a Standard should be compared with an- other African record : CITATION 9. Circumcision Ritual of the Babira, another Denis-Roosevelt record from the Belgian Congo. The mutations of rhythm within a definite meter, so notable in the singing of the Moorhead Congregation, have a striking counterpart in the first part of the Babira record^Here the meter is established immediately by the drums and a series of variations develops in the same spirit as in Tm Gonna Lift up a Standard. Despite different basic meters, both records show the tendency to constant mutation. This tendency is ingrained in the race is, indeed, a principle and, basic in all Negro musical art, is of prime importance in jazz. Although it follows a variation scheme, A, A' 9 A", et cetera, that in Western music is considered a simple one, in Negro usage it often takes on a high degree of complexity. Improvisation, the basis of Afro- American music, is set forth in a constant series of variations on a theme. These are fourfold in nature, involving melody, tone, rhythm and instrumentation, the latter including vary- ing combinations of human voices as well as instruments. In vocal improvisation, variations occur in verbal phrases, and the changes in word or syllable length and emphasis alter the idea or imagery. This produces a fifth type of mutation that may be termed poetic variation. Other congregational records, illustrating important points of cultural survival from Africa or anticipations of jazz, are listed and discussed in Appertclix: G, p. 355. A fine example of the religious dance called the ring-shout is found in the following record: CITATION 10. Run* Old Jeremiah, sung by Joe Washington Brown and Austin Golema]a, alternate leaders, at Jennings, Louisiana, (1934). This record is a very important one. The ring-shout, earliest Afro- American religious dance, still survives in isolated Southern communities. As in Africa, the 72 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS dancers, never crossing their legs (this, to the religious, would constitute dancing), move in a counterclockwise circle which presents only the right shoulders to the Deity. The feet, hands, and voices set up formidable polyrhythms. It is interesting to note that the forbidding of musical instruments in' many churches, as in this case, virtually restores the African drum and chorus form. The African quality of a performance like this would have been surprising in this country at almost any time. In 1934 it is amazing, especially from the point of view of the theory that there are no Africanisms left in American Negro culture. One can argue that this sort of phenomenal survival may be found only in isolated rural communities ; that it is no longer possible among sophisticated Negroes. Such a view appears to be sup- ported by the Negroes' obvious adaptability to non-Negroid customs. And yet in the heart af the New York Harlem, the largest and most sophisticated Negro community in the world, one can hear church services of a surprisingly African stamp. Run, Old Jeremiah is on-the-spot creation of a rhythmic- musical form achieved by pouring the ingredients of deep feel- ing and strong communal enthusiasm and excitement into the ever-existing and ready mold of the call-and-response form. This antiphony has a deep social significance. It is the arche- typal expression of the way in which the Negro tends to live. Its inclusion of all in the participation is profoundly demo- cratic ; its acceptance of the necessity of a leader is realistically so. Both the possibility of changes in leaders (as we see it hap- pen in this record, when the first becomes possessed) and the free, individual way in which the group is allowed to respond to, and comment upon, his exhortations, are deep expressions of democratic functioning. Most significant is the consciousness of a commonly felt concept of pre-existent form which operates to ensure the participation of all, while at the same time it limits the contribution of each only by its ultimate considera- tion as a just part of the whole. In Run, Old Jeremiah the leader improvises lines in a sort 73 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 of free poetic style, often repeating one a number of times for emphasis or while thinking of a line to follow. I've got a rock. You got a rock. Rock is death. my Lord. Run here, Jeremiah. 1 must go On my way. Who's that ridin 9 the chariot? One mornin* Be-fore the evening Sun 'was goin y down Behind them western hills Old number 12 Comin' down the track. See that black smoke! See that engineer! ToV that old engineer Ring his ol' bell With his hand. * 0V -fireman told, Told that engineer, Ring your black bell, Ding, ding, ding, Ding, ding, ding, ding. I was travelin 9 . I was ridin 9 Over there. 0V engineer This is the chariot This is the chariot. Each line is picked up by the congregation and tossed back in free, urgent antiphony; the calls of the leader are echoed 74 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS or responded to with wails that fall downward, like bodies to the earth. The development of antiphony, from ordered call-and- response to free overlapping phrases, that is, into polyphony, is wonderfully illustrated here. The evocation of the Dark Continent is profound and noc- turnal. It is as if these people were lifted bodily from a poor country church in Louisiana and deposited on an African plain or in an African forest, where, long ago and in just this way, their ancestors had danced and chanted, not to Jesus, but to Ogun or to Shango. Melody and harmony are things unheard of, things un- needed. Pure sound, spurting up out of unconscious life, ca- priciously consonant or fortuitously dissonant, seems to form a primordial, moving music enacted as mysteriously as the be- ginnings of man. The dance moves like a tide gathering momentum and speed in a constant acceleration, the recording beginning at J = 126 and ending at J = 166. The African tendency to gradual ac- celeration contrasts with the equally African predilection for a fixed tempo. The latter is almost unfailingly characteristic of jazz where the beat is tied to the requirements of group so- cial dancing. In both cases, there occurs a build-up of urgency. 22 In all cases rhythmic complexity tends to increase progres- sively, polyrhythms enter, and rhythmic enunciation clarifies into patterns more clipped and incisive. The last half -inch of this record is in overrhythms so complex that the mind gropes for the basic concept or combination which will make order out of the seeming confusion. 23 Inner-rhythms and overrhythms are to be heard in profusion in Run, Old Jeremiah, the former throughout in the amazing 22 There is a phase in African music as well as in some American Negro music, including jazz, that is in a lyric and relaxed mood, as in the slow blues. 23 Early notators of native African music faced this problem, conditioned by the absence of such polyrhythms in Western music and without any a priori knowledge of the rhythmic principles involved. Their attempts to render African polyrhythm in one basic meter instead of the concurrent two or more meters, led them astray into a notation hopelessly complex and confusing, involving the needless use of symbols to indicate rests and displaced accents. 75 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 and unpredictable shifting of accents, the latter in a form re- lated directly to the African drum polyrhythms. Notably, these polyrhythms are accomplished by the same people, each of whom stomps, claps, and shouts in three separate rhythms. This vol- untary action is relaxed and unstrained and sounds as natural as the involuntary polyrhythms of a man who walks in one rhythm while he talks in another and his heart beats in still another. Spiritual singing by the small group is well illustrated by the following : CITATION 11. Jesus Gain 9 To Make Up My Dying Bed, sung by Mitchell's Christian Singers, a quartet of male Negro sing- ers from Kinston, North Carolina. This group barnstorms through the South and the men 2 * frequently sing Negro spir- ituals in the Negro manner, not in the concert-hall manner of Robeson or Marian Anderson, or in the equally Europeanized manner of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. If their singing seems some- what polished, this effect derives from the classic precision of all good Negro music for the singing is truly African in feel- ing and method. Jesus Goin' To Make Up My Dying Bed is sung with great syncopation and shifting of the accent to unexpected beats and abounds in inner-rhythms and over rhythms. The melody is rephrased in a manner distinctly African as well as character- istic of jazz. The words of this spiritual are in the simple, earthy poetry of the Negro, full of graphic images drawn from his world. The idea centers around the railroad train, the omnipresent train that haunts his dreams, the fiery chariot that will carry him to better times, to greener fields, and even, on a phantom trestle, over the River to Heaven. His dying bed is a Pullman berth, which Jesus, the porter, makes up for him. Friendly God, in the humble black man's own shape, comes to perform this final act 24 Wilder Hobson writes in American Jazz Music (New York: 1939) : "Brown has recently been a truckdriver, and Davis a tobacco-factory worker; David runs an ice and coal business and Bryant is a mason." 76 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS of mercy, as touching and as tragic as the Biblical washing of feet. He does this to erase the Negro's servitude and shame! Oh, let the train run easy Hallelujah. Fm goin* to heaven in the morning Jesus is comin 9 ; God knows He's gom 9 to make up my dyin* 'bed. A scoring of the first two choruses will be found in Ex. 9, back of book. Music of this character is so resistant to notation that this score must be considered no more than an approximation, a sort of good shorthand, of the actual performance. It is fairly ac- curate in rendering the rhythm, but the magnificent timbres and the smooth glissandi cannot be shown at all, nor can the mi- crotonal variations of pitch which abound in all real Negro mu- sic. The Negro characteristically flats certain tones in the quar- ter, eighth and even sixteenth degree and perhaps less, while varying this flatting by portamenti or by undulations. The con- stant shifting of accents, with the resulting inner-rhythms, are likewise nearly impossible to render. It is to be doubted whether any readable notation can be devised to render such character- istic subtlety and variation. This emphasizes the necessity for hearing records or actual performances. Solo singing of the spiritual in the Negro church may be by any member of the congregation, by the minister or an elder, or by a visiting pastor. Accompaniment may be by piano, a small reed organ, guitar, or any instrumental combination available. There is no great difference in style between the sing- ing of the church soloist and that of the wandering street evangelist with his guitar. Both have the same fervor, tend to the same expressive roughness ; both are highly syncopated and rhythmic; finally, they both tend to improvise variations on the melody. As a rule, they simplify the melody to a final stark- ness which frequently, like that of the blues, derives from the pentachord and shows a deep disinterest in harmony. 77 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 A magnificent example of this sort of singing is to be found on a Library of Congress twelve-inch record ( AAFS-47) , Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down. Bozie Sturdivant sings with the Congregation of Silent Grove Baptist Church at Clarksdale, Mississippi. The singer's improvisations, quite evi- dently produced in a state of possession, are darkly African, phrased in remarkable gliding portamenti and abrupt changes of register. Covering three full octaves, the voice varies from clear to dirty timbres, from open voice to strident falsetto. A notable feature is the lack of antiphony. The congregation moans continually in low chords and the implacable stomping of feet is a veritable recrudescence of the African drum battery. Solo singing of the spirituals with the singer's own instru- mental accompaniment is illustrated on another Library of Congress Record (AAFS-50), Meet Me In Jerusalem, When I Lay My Burden Down, In New Jerusalem, and Steal Away. The singer, Turner Junior Johnson, renders the hymns in a voice of indescribably beautiful, rough texture. His harmonica answers each phrase antiphonally, its mournful, reedy tones duplicating almost exactly the timbres and vibrato of the voice. The tempo, of an almost dirge-like slowness, projects a sad fatefulness that is heightened by the muffled foot-stomping. There is a close connection between this solo hymn singing and the sung blues. 1 Another record (Circle R-3012), I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray, is a fine example of the authentic early "Jubilee" hymn singing. It is sung by Sister Berenice Phillips with instrumen- tal and hand-clapped background. The following record is an outstanding example of street singing: CITATION 12. Jesus Make up My Dyin 9 Bed. The singer, Blind Willie Johnson, was a guitar-playing, singing evangelist, a ragged, blind character of the New Orleans streets. The ver- sion he sings, a very different one from that of the Mitchell's Christian Singers cited before, is even more profoundly Af- rican. The singer's voice is rough and husky and, though re- 78 shining trumpets IN SOUTHERN FIELDS pellent to ears accustomed to pure tone, is deeply expressive of a whole area and range of human feeling inexpressible in any other way. Blind Willie animates his guitar and, with life breathed into it, it is his companion. The guitar, consecrated like drums in the age-old magic of primitive people, and Blind Willie are really two singers. In the record grooves are frustrated lone- liness, hungry poverty, fanatical devotion to heaven, and the ascetic waiting for it. The singing, strongly rhythmic, is the call-and-response, bare and clear, in which the singer is both leader and responding choir. He enunciates cruel and peremp- tory phrases in a voice harsh and burred ; in one that is thickly rough and crooning, he answers with pathetic downward me- lodic turns that are like appeasements, conciliations, solaces, and pardons. Throughout, the guitar, sweet and ringing, weaves a polyphony with the singer. These are, by implication, the voices of many people. So supremely natural are the Negro's gifts of rhythmic and melodic expression, that he is either largely unaware of them or ascribes them to his own sphere of activity. So, though the music of the church singer is like the blues, and that of the con- gregation is one of the sources of jazz, nevertheless, to the religious Negro such kindred music is sinful or worldly. Yet all are essentially the same music, African in form, evolving in this country with the inclusion of European material* If the religionist does not perceive his own fervor and rever- ence in jazz and the blues, if the jazz player does not find the hot qualities of his music in church singing, it is because of the functional character of Negro music. Relating intimately to the uses and acts of daily life, it may seem remarkably alike in all its forms to observers from a different culture. But within the culture these forms are explicit and differentiated. Each is colored with the overtones of its particular activity. Gravity, ominousness, or gaiety comes to reside in the music as actually as sadness resides in our minor mode or sanguineness in the major. 79 shining trumpets CHAPTER 3 We have traced the development of Afro- American music along the lines of its continuity from Africa down through two hundred and fifty years of slave work-songs and spirituals. To arrive at jazz, we must first complete our outline with the re- maining elements of the Negro ballads and the songs the little dark children sing at play. 80 IN AFRICA Speaking Drums (Ewing Galloway photo] *W!A W RAINEY, Mrs* MAM* hwTthT UH&- awtTfotsonij .[ ;^, ; t -" . ,) 4t ' p:Si:Hf-Hr!*i^ Left: Page from the Paramount Record Catalog about 1925 (From files of the Decca Record Company). Right: Ma Rainey, a professional picture (Photo from Thomas Dorsey) Ma Rainey s Wildcat Jazz Band, about 192^-5. Left to right: "Gabriel" drums; Albert Wynn, trombone; Dave Nelson, trumpet; Ma; Ed Pollack, alto saxophone; Tom Dorsey, piano (Photo from Thomas Dorsey) MEMORABILIA OF MA BERTHA "CHIPPIE" HELL The Battle of Covadonga The Caliph of Spain at Cordova (From the Mardi Gras Supplement in color, 1883. From collection of Helen Hall) MARDI GRAS FLOATS: KREWE OF MOMUS, 1883 A Funeral at Gretna (Photo by Philip Guarisco) Street parade. Note "second line'' on sidewalk (Photo by William Russell) NEW ORLEANS; MARCHEVG JAZZ At Mentes Bag Factory, 'New Orleans, about 1912. Baby Dodds, third from the left, worked here to buy his first drums (Photo from Baby Dodds) The Jaz-E-Saz Band, on the S/S St Paul, 1919. Left to. right, standing: Baby Dodds, Joe Howard, Pop Foster, Johnny St. Cyr, David Jones, Sam Dutrey. Seated; George (?) Cooper, Fate Marable, Louis Armstrong (Photo from Baby Dodds) DODDSIANA Jelly Roll Morton in Storyville, about 1903 (Photo from Mrs. Amede Colas) Big Eye Louis Nelson, clarinetist, and Freddie Keppard, trumpeter, about 1915-16. Instruments in photo used only for novelty pose (Photo from Louis Nelson) S/S Sidney, 1918. Left to right; Baby Dodds, William Ridgely, Joe Howard, Louis Armstrong, Fate Marable, David Jones, Johnny Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr, Pop Foster. Unknown bystander in rear ( Photo from Johnny St. Cyr ) S/S Capitol, 1919. Left to right: Hy Kimball, Boyd Atkins, Fate Marable (at piano), Johnny St. Cyr, David Jones, Norman Mason, Louis Armstrong, James Brecheur, Baby Dodds (Photo from Johnny St. Cyr) KIVEEBOAT DAYS Masonic Hall Hopes Hall Economy Hall Providence Hall (Jeunes Amis) NEW ORLEANS: OLD DOWNTOWN DANCE HALLS (Photos by Philip Guarisco) JOSEPH "KING" OLIVER during his days in Storyville, about 1915 (Photo from Johnny St. Cyr) RHYTHM KINGS At the Arabella Car Earn, New Orleans, 1910. Boys left to right: Emmet (Scarf Pin), Abbie Brunies, George Bru- nies ( Photo from George Bru- nies} The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, at Friars Inn, Chicago, 1921. Left to right: George Brunies, Frank Snyder, Paul Mares, Elmer Schoebel, Jack Pettis, Leon Rappolo, Arnold Loyocano, with string bass (Photo from George Brunies) A. along the roads THE NEGRO is a natural maker of ballads, that folk minstrelsy whose poet-composers are almost always unknown, whose songs, composed bit by bit by scores of humble bards, spread and grow like vines. The ballad sprouts from the soil, its tendrils spread in the sun, its seeds travel on the wind. Long after the end of the ballad-making period in England, the old English songs were preserved in the mountains and on the plantations of our own South, by the white descendants of the Scotch and the Cavaliers who settled there and by the Negro slaves who took over their masters 3 songs. In one place the old ballads remain pure. In another they have been altered, particularly by Negro singers, in that process of change which marks the ballad so long as it is a living thing. "In the early days on the plantations .'in the South, when books and newspapers were less plentiful than now, songs formed a larger part of the social life than they do at present. At the 'great house* the loved old ballads would be sung over and over, till the house servants, being quick of memory and of apt musical ear, would learn them, then pass them on in turn to their brethren of the fields. This process would be altogether oral, since the slaves were not taught to read or write/ save in exceptional cases. . "By cabin firesides . . . the old songs would be learned . . . as part of their natural heritage to ]be handed down to their children and their children's children. Such a survival among the' Negroes was remarkable, far more so than song-preserva- i This was a deliberate withholding of education to prevent dissatisfaction and revolt. (Author's note.) 81 shining trumpets CHAPTER 4* tion among the whites, who in many instances kept old ballads by writing them down in notebooks, and learning them from old broadsides or keepsake volumes; while the Negroes had none of these aids, but had to sing each song as they learned it from hearing others sing it, and must remember it of themselves. And yet they cherished the old songs and had their own versions of them." 2 We find Negro versions of many old-world ballads. Among these are the famous and beautiful Barbara Allen, The Maid Freed From the Gallows, (called the Hangman's Tree in Amer- ican versions) , Frog Went A-Courtin'* the horse-racing ballad, Skew Bally and many others. Among contemporary white Amer- ican ballads which the Negro has adapted into his own versions, is the well-known epic of the brave engineer, Casey Jones. With his love of dramatic action, his aptitude for mimicry, and his tendency toward many-meaninged symbolism, the Ne- gro invented many ballads of his own'. Some of these seem in- complete and fragmentary as narrative poems, but Negro ren- ditions must be actually heard. In them the impersonality of the traditional ballad is forsaken ; they are acting-pieces set to music; every device of facial expression and bodily gesture is used ; there are nuances of meaning, shades of suggestion, and a great amount of direct communication which tacitly relies upon a store of common knowledge. Examples of original Negro ballads are Ole Mars'r Had a Yatter Gal (from slavery days), Cotton-Eyed Joe, the famous FranJcie and Albert* Stagolee, The Grey Goose, and M r. Boll Weevil. FranJcie and Albert, the narrative of a Negro woman and her trifling, unfaithful husband, is widely known. It is the proto- type of Petunia -and her troubles with Little Joe in the light opera, Cabin m the Sky. But the ballad's denouement is not the opera's nick-of-time repentance. The ends of simple justice, * Scarborough, Dorothy: On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, op. cit. s Registered November 21, 1580 in the Register of the London Company of Stationers. * Also, variously, Frankie and Johnny, Pauly, Lilly, Franky Baker, etc. 82 shining trumpets ALONG THE ROADS or Vengeance at least, are effected by Franlde's smoking six- shooter. The dying Albert, his luck played out, is left to the higher and final justice of St. Peter. Rubber-tired carriage, Kansas City hack, Took poor Albert to the cemetery But forgot to bring him back. Oh, he was my man, But he done me wrong! Stagolee, the ballad of the legendary bravo, shows the Ne- gro's revolt and his blind attempt at revenge by becoming a "bad-man." In this ballad, probably based on the life of an actual person, his lurid adventures are melodramatically re- counted to their end in his death from another's bullets. Stag- olee, although an outlaw, is the legendary hero of the earlier slave revolts, leading forlorn hope blindly and singlehandedly. 5 TComparable with Stagolee, is the ballad by the great jazz pianist, Jelly Roll Morton, about the New Orleans bad man, Aaron Harris. The only recorded version of this ballad is in the Library of Congress Archives, as played and sung by Morton. Mr. Boll Weevil, a narrative about the cottongrowers* en- emy, the weevil, is, in a wider sense, an epic in which the Negro personifies, in the elusive and unyielding antagonist, his own indomitable racial spirit and his age-old search for a home. This is magic animation of the beetle with human life or even with the divine life of a tribal deliverer god ; it is transference of the Negro's tribulation to an invincible foe imagined as the Ne- gro himself. The ballad is rife with pathos but implicit with hope. 'Member one time I taken a boll weevil. Put Mm in a bottle an 9 stopped it wid a cork. In a week I looked at it an 9 it was still lively. I don 9 believe nobody can kill a boll weevil. An 9 de farmer was doin 9 ev'yfhing m de worl* he could to him . . . 6 s Parts of the Stagolee ballad later became Stack O'Lee Blues. A fine re- corded version is sung by the great blues singer, Ma Rainey, on Paramount No. 12357, recently reissued on the Signature label. e Lomax, John A. and Alan: Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Betty, op. cit. 83 shining trumpets CHAPTER 4 The psychological transference is clearly expressed in this version from Texas : 7 Fahmah say to de "Whut makes yore head so red," Weevil say to de fahmah, "It's a wondah ah ain't dead, LooMn* foJi a home, loohin* foh a home!" Nigger say to de weevil, "Ah'll throw you in de hot sand" Weevil say to de nigger, "Ah'll stand it like a man. Ah'll have a home, ah'll have a home!" Says de Captain to de Mistis, "What do you think o"b dat? Dis Boll Weevil done make a nes 9 Inside my Sunday hat; He'll have a home, he'll have a home!" By the time the weevil begins to prey on the Captain (the white master) , he has become the victorious black man himself or his supernatural champion. Later, in Bo-Weavil Blues, the weevil is the living symbol of deliverance, taken for granted, to whom the singer can address her own personal woes, 8 Another famous ballad, perhaps of Negro origin and often used as a work-song, is John Henry. This legendary character 9 appears in dozens of ballad versions from West Virginia to Florida and to Mississippi, dying from the blows of a "nine- pound hammer" or on the gallows with a rope around his neck, An even earlier hammer-song is the spiritual Nor ah, quoted by Dorothy Scarborough and concerning which she writes : 10 7 Scarborough, Dorothy: On the Trail of Negro Polk Songs, op. cit. * Bo-Weavil Blues, by Ma Rainey, on Paramount records Nos. 12080 and 12603. e There was a John Harvey, a West Virginian known as the strongest steel- driller ever to work there. He was murdered in the way depicted in the ballad and this event is supposedly the origin of the song. A good version of the John Henry song is to be found on a Library of Congress record, AAFS-15, 10-inch. 10 Scarborough, Dorothy: On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, op. tit. 84 shining trumpets ALONG THE ROADS "Here is a hammer-song that has to do with a more ancient event that John Henry's untimely taking-off. It is a spiritual adapted to use as a work-song, for the antiphonal questions and responses mark the rhythmic strokes of the hammer which tool here is given power of thought and speech/' Nor ah was a hundred and twenty years buildin 9 de ark of God 9 And entry time his hammer ring, Nordh cried, "Amen!" Well, who build de ark NoraJi build it. Hammer Jceep a-ringm 9 , said, "Norah build it!" Well, who build de ark? Norah build it. Who build de ark? Norah build it. Who build de ark? Norah build it, Cut his timber down. As in the work-songs. Lead Belly furnishes many of the best recorded versions of Negro ballads. These are to be found both in the Library of Congress and on commercial records. His singing and style are almost invariably authentic. A version of The Noble SJcewball is available under a variant title: CITATION 13. Stewball, sung by Lead Belly with the Golden Gate Quartet. I This version alternates verse and chorus. Each verse is sung by Lead Belly with chanted responses by the male quartet ; all the singers join in the choruses. Where Lead Belly elsewhere has presented the straight version of this ballad, here he shows it, not only in its normal course of folk transformation, but also as a white ballad being transformed into African antiphony. Lead Belly becomes the leader ; the quartet furnishes the choral responses which at the same time imitate guitar chords. The singing is Negroid and the melody is fitted into the type of inner-rhythmic pattern which occurs with frequency in jazz and is called the stomp. In this instance, the pattern is formed in a rhythm of three-over-two. This, like other stomp patterns, 85 shining trumpets CHAPTER 4 is directly derived from guitar and banjo playing. (See Ex. 10 5 back of book) The Grey Goose is a fine example of the Negro's epic ballad, one used on occasion as a work-song. A good and full version isjfcte following : I CITATION 14. Grey Goose, sung by Lead Belly with the Golden I Gate Quartet. It was one Sunday mornin 9 Lawd, lawd, lawd! al The preacher went a-huntin 9 ! He carried 'long his shotgun. Well 9 'long come a grey goose. The gun went off boo-loo [zulu?] And down come a grey goose* He was six weeks a-fallin'! And my wife and yo 9 wife. They gwe him feather-pickin*. They was six weeks a-pickin 9 , And they put him on to parboil. He was six weeks a-boilin', And they put him on the table, And the knife wouldn't cut him, Aw, the fork wouldn't stick him. And they throwed him in the hog-pen, And the hog couldn't eat him, Aw, he broke the hog's teeth out. They tak'n him to the saw mill, And the saw wouldn't cut him. Aw, he broke the saw's teeth out. An 9 the last time I seed him, He was fly in' cross de ocean With a long string o' goslin's* t An 9 they all goin 9 , "Quack, quacTcS*\ Here is the triumph of the man with dark skin : it is clearly not^ngeance, for a grey goose is shot, not a white one. |The development of African Negro music through antiphony into polyphony is clearly discernible in the singing of Grey Goose. We encounter here, in a single song, the sequence of 11 This response by the quartet follows each Zine by Lead Belly. 86 shining trumpets ALONG THE ROADS development that characterizes the whole history of African music. 1 " TheGrolden Gate singers start by responding to Lead Belly's lines with harmonized antiphonal responses, "Lawd, lawd, lawd!" which are distinctly separate from his lines. Very soon they begin to hold the responses past the beginning of the lead- er's lines and African polyphony, in its most rudimentary form, has begun'. With the line, "The knife wouldn't cut him," the responses begin to come in before the end of Lead Belly's lines, and overlapping occurs from both ends of the line, as rising water climbs up both sides of a dry sandbar. With the line, "Aw, he broke the saw's teeth out," complete overlapping be- gins: the water has closed over the top of the sandy mound. Simultaneously, the response lines begin to lose their strictly harmonic division into set chords and separate into independent melodic lines woven together polyphonically. With the line, "An' the last time I seed him," leader's voice and chorus sing- con- tinually together in a free Negroid polyphony with the leading line tossed along like a piece of flotsam on the swirling current. With this so close to jazz form the development of Negro singing into band music is clear. The wild and compelling quality of Lead Belly's singing, an almost hypnotic power which he projects even in his most tran- quil moments, acts like a reagent on the sophisticated veneer of the Negroes, who sing with him, dissolving it and exposing the true racial character. Prophetic of jazz, this singing is also a strong reversion to the African spirit. These singers are lit- erally sent into an unconscious projection of their racial music which forms anew from a growing excitement that verges on the trance. In three minutes' time, from first note to last, the rever- sion is surprisingly complete. In Africa, Lead Belly in all prob- ability would have been a priest using his powers in sanctioned ritual, dealing openly and directly with dark magic. In this same way, a perfunctory or studied performance in the later and decadent period of jazz is sometimes galvanized by a hot and imperious trumpet, suddenly inspired, which 87 CHAPTER 4 sweeps the other players out of set arrangement into unre- hearsed, hot, weaving polyphony. To the uninitiated observer, particularly one deeply versed in the ways of our Western mu- sic, this occurrence is apt to seem a wild and unaccountable de- parture from order and sanity, as though the players were sud- denly seized by hysteria. To believe this, is to misunderstand jazz and the spirit and processes of African improvisational art. What actually happens is not a descent into chaos. It is progress from an order that is artificial to the Negro to one basic and truly creative. It is a sudden movement, like a shudder of relief when one is done with a lie, at once a liberation and a reaffirmation of integrity recaptured. A section of wholly delightful and diverting Negro folk mu- sic is to be found in the children's songs. These have the na'ive charm of all children's songs, which everywhere preserve prim- itive elements of culture. They stress dancing, and have a synco- pated, rhythmic piquancy and a racial warmth peculiarly their own. They reward study by revealing a wealth of surviving Africanisms. The most remarkable feature of the singing and dancing of Negro children, one never missing from their music, is rhythmic ability* Young Negroes are rhythmically accurate and imagina- tive ; they are able, without aberration, to maintain a bealt that may speed up but does so by a smooth and almost imperceptible gradation. They are able to maintain this beat in the midst of the most varied and baffling of displaced accents. They can add other beats at will in a rhythmic counterpoint difficult even to analyze. They have the ability, finally, to wander into inde- pendent rhythms during which the basic beat disappears only to reappear suddenly, showing that it has been remembered all the time. In countless Negro churches, I have seen mere infants clap their hands or stand in the pews dancing in rhythms that are simple but amazingly sharp and elastic. I have seen a Negra piano teacher instructing a child who responded with an in- stantaneous grasp of the necessity of accuracy and the inner, shining trumpets ALONG THE ROADS pulsating life of rhythm. The marked contrast of this phe- nomenal rhythmic ability of the Negro child with its compara- tive lack among white children, poses again the scientific prob- lem discussed in Appendix D. Is not the Negroid rhythmic skill a racial attribute? How can all of these wide discrepancies develop out of the common environment of black and white children? For is en- vironment only in the home? The sounds of machinery, the rush- ing locomotive, the purring automobile engine, as well as the host of rhythmic patterns in nature rain, wind, the repeated calls of bird songs are in the common environment of all Americans. It is obvious that rhythmic ability can be learned by many whites. Yet even so, when observing a dancing class of white children or listening to young white violinists or pianists, one is impressed by the weak rhythmic sense generally displayed. Eve^ period, to Fra^ a 3fekP^LJffiffild piano playing, to Fred -_ |t P B -pj|^^ tV> *v~, - zmdmm $& * ^^^^M?^ degree the ^J^ unpredictable nuance, and the expressive, im- ,'fV/,",^*',,^" ?*w< >f -, V jv ?"-,*.*. provisational inspiration of the ,Negrcw W- - ?"* f<" ^* *" T "$?* w