The African Muslim origins of the Blues — The Story of the How The Music of Africa Took Over the World, Part 1
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy, now, save poor Bob if you please"
Ooh, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooh-ee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin' down
*Side note: The Crossroads have a deep meaning in African mythology
The Blues is a musical genre born in the Deep South, created by African-Americans in the 1860’s. The Blues also form the base from which jazz, R&B (rhythm and blues) and rock and roll all later came from. The Blues are one of the most influential musical art forms in the world, and forms a large part of the DNA for most modern American popular music. But as well know as the Blues are, two important historical facts of its origins are often overlooked. The first is that many elements of the Blues, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be directly traced back to the music of Africa. The second is that many features of the Blues including the long “wavy intonation” notes and the instrumentation, have direct origins from West Africa Muslims. From the 1600’s to the mid-1800’s, tens of thousands of Muslim slaves from West Africa were taken by force to the United States. Based on where most American slaves were taken from 20%-30% percent of the African slaves taken to the United States were Muslims.
I usually start my historical stories with accounts of when I first heard of a subject. But with the Blues I really couldn’t even begin to guess. growing up I heard a steady stream of Blues, Gospel, Reggae, R&B and Calypso from when I was a child. The Blues was one of the foundations of my musical upbringing as my parents played it on the old record player. I’m finally going to start a project I planned on starting year ago. I’m going to explore how African music crossed the Atlantic during the transatlantic slave trade, and birthed many of the most popular forms of music in the world.
The Blues has its roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, and in Negro spirituals. Blues mixed spirituals, work songs, field hollers, ring “shouts”, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads, into a new musical art form. The Blues are characterized by call-and-response patterns, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.
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The Blues is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first part of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans.
The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the emancipation of slavery in the USA, and the development of juke joints. It quickly became associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves, and the struggles they endured. Historical chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres.
The lyrics of early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called "AAB" pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, "Dallas Blues" (1912) and "Saint Louis Blues" (1914), were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. W.C. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times. The lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody.
The current and historical lands of the Igbo people, In Nigeria, West Africa
Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times". This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo (a large ethnic group from Nigeria) origin for blues. The Igbo had reputation throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and a despondent outlook when they were bonded into slavery (See: Black Kos: Igbo Landing - The Legend of the Flying Africans, When death is a better option than slavery).
The lyrics in the Blues often relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" (1927) tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:
Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time
I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time
And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine
But although many historical accounts have begone to recognize the African roots of the Blues, exactly what population of Africans gave rise to the Blues is still not widely recognized. Its rarely acknowledged but almost 30 percent of the African slaves taken to the United States were Muslim. Being a central tenant of Islam and an untold number of them also spoke and wrote Arabic (and yes there’s proof of this). Despite being pressured by slave owners to adopt Christianity, many of these slaves continued to secretly practice both Islam and their customs. They melded their traditions from Africa into their new environment in the antebellum South. Forced to do menial, back-breaking work on plantations, they still managed, to find a way to voice a belief in the God of the Quran through song. Music historians believe that these slave’s religious songs, eventually evolved and merged with different singing traditions from other parts of Africa, into the shouts and field hollers that gradually birthed the Blues.
Historian Sylviane Diouf has identified Islamic music as an influence on blues music. Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian (Ethiopionian) African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America.
Only Surviving Arabic Slave Narrative Written in the United States. Authored by Omar Ibn Said, a wealthy intellectual from West Africa. He wrote about his capture and enslavement in
— Digitized by Library of Congress
Another way that Muslim slaves had an indirect influence on blues music was in the choice of instruments they played. There was a pronounced historical difference in the music performed by the predominantly Muslim Sahelian (slaves captured from the dry inland plains) slaves and the predominantly non-Muslim slaves from coastal West Africa and Central Africa. The Sahelian Muslim slaves generally favored wind and string instruments and solo singing, whereas the non-Muslim slaves generally favored drums and group chants. Drumming (which was common among slaves from the Congo and other non-Muslim regions of Africa) was banned by white slave owners. White slave owners in America were threatened by African drummers ability to allow slaves communicate over long differences with each other. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, drumming inspired large gatherings of slaves to revolt.
On the other hand stringed instruments were generally allowed because slave owners considered them akin to European instruments like the violin. Plantation owners who feared revolt outlawed drums and group chants, but allowed the Sahelian slaves to continue singing and playing their wind and string instruments, which the plantation owners found less threatening. Stringed instruments were favored by slaves from Muslim regions of Africa, where they accompanied a long tradition of musical storytelling. Among the instruments introduced by Muslim African slaves were ancestors of the banjo. While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the fiddle and guitar. Some were also allowed to perform at balls for slave-holders, allowing the migration of their music across the Deep South.
African slaves who managed to cobble together a banjo or other instrument could play more widely in public. By the way the American banjo also originated with African slaves. According to Professor Gerhard Kubik, this solo- oriented slave music featured elements of an Arabic-Islamic song style that had been imprinted by centuries of Islam's presence in West Africa. Professor Gerhard Kubik is an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Mainz in Germany. He has written one of the most comprehensive book on Africa's connection to Blues music — "Africa and the Blues".
Kubik believes that many of today's blues singers unconsciously echo these Arabic-Islamic patterns in their music. Kubik writes in "Africa and the Blues" that "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." (See: Black Kos, Week In Review — The Arab slave trade in Africa and Black Kos - Arab and Islamic Presence in Africa Part Two )
Master Kora maker Alieu Suso in the Gambia
Melisma is the use of many notes in one syllable; so, instead of a note that produces, say, a single sound of "ah," you'd get a note that produces something like, "ah-ahhhh-ahhh-ah-ah." Wavy intonation refers to a series of notes that veer from major to minor scale and back again, something that's very common in both blues music and in the Muslim call to prayer. The Maghreb is the Arab-Muslim region of North Africa. Large regions of West Africa had been in contact with the Islamic world via the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Mabhreb and the Sahel (the vast grasslands region South of the Sharah).
The belief that blues is historically derived from West African music including from Mali is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s often quoted characterization of Ali Farka Touré’s tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues".
"Many traits that have been considered unusual, strange and difficult to interpret by earlier blues researchers can now be better understood as a thoroughly processed and transformed Arabic-Islamic stylistic component."
Kubik — "Africa and the Blues".
The full extent of the link between Islam and American blues music may never be totally know. Yet a growing body of evidence, gathered by academics like Kubik, and by Cornelia Walker Bailey, a Georgia author and historian who is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of a Georgia slave who prayed toward Mecca, point to a deep relationship between slaves of Islamic descent and American culture. Muslim slaves from West Africa were just one factor in the formation of American blues music, but they were a factor.
Senegambia region of West Africa, this heavily Muslin area was a major region for the export of captured African slaves to the Americas.
The most compelling evidence of an African instrument as a predecessor to African-American Blues instruments is the "Akonting". The Akonting is a folk lute of the Jola tribe of Senegambia. It is a clear predecessor to the American banjo in its playing style, the construction of the instrument itself and in its social role as a folk instrument. The Kora is played by a professional caste of praise singers for the rich and aristocracy (called griots or jalis) and is not considered folk music. Jola music may not have been influenced much by North African and Middle Eastern music, which may point to African American music not being, according to Sam Charters, related to kora music.
Although the Islam brought to America by enslaved Africans did not survive long, it did leave traces that are visible even today. The akonting is perhaps the most important and concrete link that exists between African and African-American music. The music of the Akonting and that played by on the banjo by elder African-American banjo players, even into the mid 20th century is easily identified as being very similar.
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The practice of ring shout, a form of religious dance in which men and women rotate counterclockwise while singing, clapping their hands and shuffling their feet, was directly inherited from enslaved Muslims such as Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali in the Georgia Sea Islands. It originally mimicked the ritual circling (or shaw’t) of the Kaaba in Mecca by Muslim pilgrims. Interviews of formerly enslaved people collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s contain reminiscences of rice cakes called saraka, which were handed out during rituals and feast days. From the Arabic word sadaqah, or freewill offering, this charity is an aspect of zakat, one of the Five Pillars of Islam. And early blues singers, like those recorded by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in “Levee Camp Holler,” employed singing styles reminiscent of the adhan, or call to prayer. They use sweeping and extended vocalizations to fill the words with intense emotions.
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Many different flavors of the Blues eventually evolved include country blues, Delta blues, Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as the Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II is widely recognized as when the transition from acoustic to electric blues began; as well as the broadening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. The Blues also form the base from which jazz, R&B (rhythm and blues) and rock and roll all later came from. As these other forms spread through out Latin America and the Caribbean, they mixed with other musical forms of African descent — helping to birth some of the most popular music in the world.
Sources:
African blues
The Roots and Impact of African American Blues Music
Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas — 15th anniversary edition, 2013, New York University Press — Sylviane Diouf
Muslim roots of the blues / The music of famous American blues singers reaches back through the South to the culture of West Africa
Origins of the blues
"Africa and the Blues"— Gerhard Kubik
AFRICAN MUSLIMS IN EARLY AMERICA — Smithsonian Institute
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Observing the vicious murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis last spring was not only shocking; it was disorienting. I wondered: was this 1968 all over again, or the Red Summer of 1919, when anti-black violence consumed the country amidst another devastating pandemic, or 1877, the year the bright lights of Reconstruction were violently snuffed out just a dozen years after the Civil War restored the Union on the basis of freedom and equal citizenship under the law? And this was before the presidential election in November!
The tense days that followed—made all the more desolate by the loss of such icons as John Lewis and C.T. Vivian—only reinforced my sense that the history of the first Reconstruction was being refracted through our own lives and in our own time. Then came the special elections in Georgia in January, when, on the eve of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Dr. King’s church in Atlanta, became the first African American ever sent to the Senate from his state and the eleventh Black American to be elevated to that chamber overall. The first had been Hiram Revels, of Mississippi, in 1870, and, like Warnock, Revels had been a man of the Word. In fact, during Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner tells us, three of the first sixteen African American members of Congress were ministers, and of the more than 2,000 Black officeholders at every level of government in that era, more than 240 were ministers—second only to farmers!
All of this was a powerful reminder to me of the vital role that the Black Church and its leaders—men and women—have always played at pivotal moments in our collective struggle to realize that “more perfection union”: a lesson that had already been brought vividly home to me in filming my new history series for PBS and authoring its companion book, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. When we began working on it, though, never could I have imagined that we would be launching at a time when the stories we wanted to tell of grace and resilience, struggles and redemption, hope and healing, would be so desperately needed, given all that we’ve lost and endured in the past year.
Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock
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WhenWhen Melissa Creary talks about racism in health care, she has first-hand experience: As a public health expert at the University of Michigan with decades of research experience, she’s an expert on sickle cell disease, the disparities in its effects, and how discrimination and stigma feed into those outcomes. But she also lives with the disease, and, she told me, has learned to navigate racism in the health care system herself.
Sickle cell disease causes some red blood cells to transform into crescent shapes, increasing the risk of cardiovascular problems and organ failure, and often producing agonizing pain. The disease afflicts 100,000 Americans, most of them Black. Because it doesn’t affect the white majority the health care system was by and large built for, it’s long been under-researched and undertreated — in fact, life expectancy for sickle cell patients fell in recent decades, according to Kaiser Health News, even as life expectancy increased overall.
“The lifelong consequences of living in a society that protects and values unequally, matched with the lifelong physiologic burdens of disease, propel me to work toward ways to combat structural racism and increase the quality of life for this population,” Creary said.
These unbalanced outcomes are just one example of the racial disparities in health care that have fueled the Black-white life expectancy gap.
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During a career in which she has worked with a lot of young people, Yamani Hernandez says there has always been a constant. “Even if the program was never about health or bodies, inevitably somebody would be navigating pregnancy and either needing an abortion or support of being a young parent,” she says. And so it is not surprising that when there was the chance to empower pregnant people, she took it.
In 2015, Hernandez became the first Black person to lead the National Network of Abortion Funds. “It blew me away to find out thousands of people had taken this issue up, at their kitchen tables, deciding to organize themselves and pay for people’s abortions. It is a revolutionary act to me and I wanted to be a part of it,” says the now-executive director. “They’re my superheroes for sure…and they keep me going.”
Here she reflects on how abortion funders survived the Trump years, what they’re bracing for under Joe Biden and how Black reproductive rights activists are changing the framework through which this work is done.
Yamani Hernandez, executive director of The National Network of Abortion Funds Photo Credit: National Network of Abortion Funds
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'We don't need to be relegated to one month. We are the fabric of America. Black History Month is the kickoff point," says history services associate Faithe Norrell. The Grio: Oversimplifying Black history: What schools do wrong
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With [just days] left in Black History Month, some scholars and activists say it’s time to change the way the subject is taught in schools, shining a light on systemic racism in addition to the often-taught subject of the Civil Rights Movement.
President Joe Biden has made it part of his mission to tackle racial discrimination following the murders of Black citizens and massive protests. On his Inauguration Day, Biden announced several executive orders aimed at addressing systemic racism.
Increased awareness of systemic racism has led to debate around the way American schools teach Black history. Just this month, a Utah school received backlash for suggesting Black History Month be optional.
For many students, Black History Month is their first exposure to any significant Black history and can serve as an important entry point to further discussion. Yet, according to CBS, there are no national standards for Black History Month curriculum.
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Ghana just received its first Covid-19 vaccine doses from Covax, the global initiative created to help ensure all countries have vaccine access.
A total of 600,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in Ghana’s capital Accra on Wednesday. It is the official start of a long worldwide immunization campaign.
Ghana is the first country to get these vaccines. It will begin its rollout next week, starting with frontline health care workers, elderly people, and people with underlying conditions. The 600,000 doses, however, will cover just a fraction of Ghana’s approximately 30 million people.
The Ivory Coast will be next up to receive vaccine doses from Covax. But immunization campaigns in Africa are just beginning, after millions and millions of shots have been administered in wealthier countries.
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When hiba bourouqia won a Chinese government scholarship to study international trade, she was “full of hope, full of life”. Now, however, “I just sit and cry,” says the 19-year-old Moroccan. China’s strict quarantine measures have forced her to study remotely from her home near Casablanca. Ms Bourouqia considered giving up and applying for a Moroccan university. But she says the academic standards are not up to China’s, so she is persevering.
Around the world the dreams of many international students have been shattered by the pandemic. The virus has also damaged China’s hopes to continue as a major destination for international students. In 2019 it was third globally, receiving almost 500,000 foreign students, just behind Britain, though still only half the number going to America. Now, however, China’s tough border controls have made it almost impossible for overseas students to enter the country. Many are furious.
Africa has been a big target of Chinese efforts to enhance its global “soft power”. More than 80,000 Africans were studying there before the pandemic struck. China has surpassed America (47,000) and Britain (29,000) as the destination of choice for African students and is now closing on the traditional frontrunner, France (112,000). The Chinese government has showered the continent with bursaries. Education Sub Saharan Africa, a British charity, estimates that 43% of all scholarships to sub-Saharan Africa are provided by the Chinese government.
Unlike Western students, who usually study in China for a year at most, many Africans live from enrolment to graduation on campus. And for all China’s largesse with scholarships, about 85% of them are self-funded, so they feel heavily invested. They also worry about job prospects. “Would you employ a person who did civil engineering online?” asks Davine, a third-year undergraduate who is stuck in his home country, Zimbabwe.
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A judge ruled Wednesday that the descendants of enslaved people who were owned by members of the Cherokee Nation — known as Cherokee Freedmen — have citizenship rights.
"The Cherokee Nation can continue to define itself as it sees fit," U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan wrote in his ruling, "but must do so equally and evenhandedly with respect to native Cherokees and the descendants of Cherokee Freedmen."
After Emancipation, the Cherokee Nation granted its former slaves tribal citizenship as part of a treaty with the U.S. government in 1866. But in 2007, Cherokee members voted overwhelmingly to strip 2,800 Freedmen of their membership, defining tribal citizenship as "by blood."
NPR previously reported that the U.S. government had opposed the tribe's vote and that at one point, the Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended $37 million in funding to the Cherokee Nation.
Now, the fight over citizenship has come to an end.
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