Jerry Underwood

African-American Influence on Music

in the United States 1871-Present

To say that African-Americans have influenced music in the United States would be both problematic and an understatement. It is problematic in that separating them from other groups segregates them culturally as an “other” and connotes that “American” music is intrinsically not of African-American descent or that it could even exist without the numerous influences of the African-American musical community. It is an understatement due to the sheer complexity of music history and the breadth of musical genres that claim African-American influences on their work. From Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto to the Rolling Stones to Andrew Lloyd Weber, many musicians can point to specific African-American artists who have made an impact on the style. This is not to say that the dominant culture’s acceptance of African-American music confirms or denies the importance of it, however, influence is frequently gauged by commercial success and the ability to cross cultural lines. Since the Civil War, African-Americans have continued to innovate and influence the dominant culture’s music until today when it is virtually impossible to count the ripples and interconnected styles of modern music. To display its influence properly, it is necessary to separate the African-American music community from that of the dominant culture and in so doing attempt to increase the status of the influence from understated to a fuller representation of how African-Americans have changed music in America to “American music.”

The Roots of Influence

A common assertion of music historians places the origins of African-American music in Africa. This argument, however, is only partly true in a similar fashion that one could say pizza originated in Italy. Slaves brought to the new world were stripped of their religions, traditions, and cultural identities, separated from family members with the same cultural experience, and placed with other Africans who held different beliefs and customs. Without the benefit of written texts and community reinforcement of ideas, they were forced to rely upon memory. The perpetuators of slavery were careful to rid slaves of familiarity which kept insurrections to a minimum due to an inability to communicate. This passage in The Life of Olaudah Equiano gives a first-hand account of this pratice:

“Are the dearest friends and relations now rendered more dear by their separation…and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery, with the small comfort of being together, and mingling their sufferings and sorrows?” (38)

Without fellow countrymen, slaves were isolated from their history and traditions and from this collective isolation sprang the group identity of African-Americans. The hardships of everyday life were comforted only through the songs that rose up from the very earth the slaves cultivated, and each song, though drawing from a fading but present African culture, added to the unwritten cannon of a distinctly African-American sound. In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass speaks of these deep, mournful songs of his fellow slaves.

[The songs] told a tale of woe…they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. (263)

These spirituals, as they would later be called, gained such prominence during slavery that in 1871, George L. White, a white Sunday-school teacher from Nashville, formed a group called the Fisk Jubilee Singers. W.E.B. DuBois was so moved by the singing that he wrote of this ground-breaking group in The Souls of Black Folk in the last essay “Of the Sorrow Songs”.

[T]he Fisk Jubilee Singers sang their slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again…[T]hey rode, - four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women, - led by a man with a cause and a purpose…So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University. (182-3)

Many churches received the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and combined with an influx of newly-freed African-Americans into their congregations, various denominations began adopting the spirituals into hymnals such as “Let Us Break Bread Together”, “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, and “He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Harry Burleigh also made an impact on music using the slave spirituals as a basis. As a member of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, Burleigh held company with Antonin Dvorák and sang African-American spirituals and folk songs for him for hours on end. Dvorák, inspired by these songs, composed his symphony From the New World and remarked before its premier, “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music (Abdul 45).” The heart-wrenching spirituals, pulling from old world tradition and relying heavily on the hardships of the new world, created the early prototype for African-American music that would continue to influence all facets of American music as a whole.

The Early Years: 1895-1917

            Around the turn of the century, two young men turned American music on its ear by adapting the syncopated rhythms of “cakewalk” music into piano scores. In 1895, Ben Harney published the first ragtime piece titled “You've Been a Good Old Wagon”, and it met with great commercial success. Scott Joplin, “The King of Ragtime” who already had published several marches and waltzes, decided to follow the success of Harney and published “Original Rags” in March of 1899 and one of the most well-known rags, the “Maple Leaf Rag”, the following September. Ragtime had gained such popularity that even classical music took note of the new rhythms available, spurring Igor Stravinsky to write two ragtime pieces – “Ragtime” in 1918 and “Piano Rag Music” in 1919 – and Darius Milhaud to compose “La création du monde” in 1923. Ragtime’s influence can also be clearly heard in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” which premiered in 1924. John Philip Sousa’s band also played many ragtime and cakewalk pieces, and he eventually incorporated aspects of each into his own music. As Joplin waned in health, however, so did the popularity of ragtime, and his death in 1917 is seen as the end of the ragtime era though it regained a brief revisit in 1973 when “The Entertainer” was used as the main accompaniment for the movie “The Sting”. Ragtime not only influenced the classics but another style of African-American music that would come to be known as America’s unique gift to music – jazz. Down the Mississippi River from Joplin’s Missouri, New Orleans bustled with African-American musicians who learned ragtime tunes to play in brothels and barrel houses (Buerkle 15). Before edging their way into the new music scene of jazz, musicians cut their teeth on ragtime then modified the beats. Initially a purely black style, white musicians soon appropriated jazz. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white group, recorded the first jazz record for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1917 and were credited with its creation even though Joe “King” Oliver and his Original Creole Band had been touring for four years playing jazz on vaudeville (13). Charles “Buddy” Bolden, now credited with being the first true jazz musician, had been playing since 1894 and was instrumental in the shift from ragtime to jazz. The “Jim Crow” attitude, however, overlooked these early pioneers who were forced to innovate their culture’s music again in favor of a “blacker” form of jazz. The battle over the intellectual property of African-American music would have to be fought note by note, if not in the recording studios then in the night clubs of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York.

The Harlem Renaissance: 1917-1934

            When the government closed Storyville, one of the most popular jazz venues, many of the New Orleans jazz pioneers packed up their brass and emigrated north to Chicago or New York. With such notables as Johnny Dodds, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe “King” Oliver, and Louis Armstrong, to name a few, jazz soon attracted a wide audience in the Windy City and thrust Armstrong into the role of “leading jazz musician”. The energetic music inspired Carl Sandburg to write one of the first jazz-related poems, “Jazz Fantasia” in 1920.

[Excerpt]

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, jazzmen.

Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy
tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go husha-
husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.

While Chicago epitomized the “down and dirty” jazz of Sandburg’s rendition, New York began to attract an “artsier” crowd due in large part to a new publication by W.E.B. Du Bois called The Crisis. Du Bois used this periodical to espouse pride in African heritage and encourage African-Americans to become their own people rather than imitators of white behavior. Thrilled with the idea of “The New Negro Movement”, musicians flocked to the Harlem district of New York to try out new beats and test the limits of their instruments. One of these musicians, Fletcher Henderson, formed one of the most successful orchestras in early jazz and managed to entice Louis Armstrong to leave Chicago and join with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Cootie Williams, and Fats Waller. Enamored by Henderson’s smooth sound which later led to the swing style, a white band leader named Benny Goodman hired him to arrange music for his group thrusting Goodman into the limelight. Harlem diva Mamie Smith became the first women to record a blues song in 1920 with Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues.” The next year, Eva Taylor, wife of Clarence Williams and already a noteworthy blues singer, broke new ground in 1921 by being one of the first female singers on the radio, and over the years, she would influence countless other women to try their hand. In 1927, the Cotton Club hired Duke Ellington who became one of the most prolific and influential jazz men ever known. Over Ellington’s career, he recorded numerous scores for Bing Crosby, Marx Brothers movies, Mae West movies, Sinatra movies, and played for Gershwin’s Broadway musical Show Girl. Ellington was followed by Cab Calloway as the Cotton Club’s “house band” in 1931, and the club continued to draw crowds from both the black and white communities. James Weldon Johnson commented on the shift of perspectives in his 1930 book Black Manhattan:

Fifty years ago white people who heard the Spirituals sung were touched and moved with sympathy for the “poor Negro.” Today the reaction is…more of admiration for the creative genius of the race. (278)

Johnson’s and the general public’s admiration of the renewed Spirituals was due, in large part, to the “Harlem group” which included Paul Robeson, Lawrence Brown, and Harry Burleigh. Robeson had, by this time, taken the leading role in various plays that toured internationally – Othello at the Savoy in London, Show Boat also in London, and The Emperor Jones in Berlin (Johnson 196). All over New York, African-American artists played to mixed audiences who started looking at jazz less as “deviant” music and more as an inspired expression of the soul. Langston Hughes derived many of his early works of poetry from the late nights spent at jazz clubs. Works such as “Song for a Banjo Dance,” “Harlem Night Club,” and Ask Your Mama drew heavily on the rhythmic beats of jazz. Trouble soon hit, however, when huge ripples from the stock market crash of 1929 finally put many musicians out of work by the 1930s.

The Lean Years: 1934-1947

            With the jazz big bands suffering from economic hard times, African-Americans looked to other forms of music to fill the void. Once again, Chicago attracted the spotlight with a deep, powerful force that had been brewing in the Mississippi River Delta for about twenty years. This force was Blues. Influenced by the artists like Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, guitarists headed north to seek their fortune: from Texas, T-bone Walker, from Louisiana, “Leadbelly”, and from Mississippi, Son House. These pioneers would later inspire young start-ups like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, and John Lee Hooker. The African-American scene, however, was itself undergoing a transformation in identity as the “race records” of the 20s and 30s were renamed to the all-inclusive rhythm and blues, or R&B. Under this broad, new title, many musicians fared well with African-American audiences, but the white audience had become elusive, and commercial success was limited. It was not until after World War II that African-Americans began to resurface in the dominant culture’s music and change it forever. Again.

Rock & Roll to Disco: The Rediscovery: 1947-1978

            From the primal jazz capitol of New Orleans came a young man named Roy Brown. Brown had written a tune using a mixture of gospel and blues and managed to have it recorded in July of 1947. Blues star Wynonie Harris heard the song and immediately recorded a more upbeat cover of the song in December that same year. With this song, “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, rock and roll was born. As a prominent musician in African-American circles, Harris’ popularization of this style of music spread throughout the Blues loving South and several of his concerts were frequented by a young boy from Tupelo, Mississippi named Elvis Aaron Presley. Latching on to this upbeat tempo, a few African-American artists were able to cross-over from a primarily black crowd to the new target of popular music: white, middle-class teenagers. Among these select few were Fats Domino with “The Fat Man” in 1949, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry with “Maybelline” in 1955, and Little Richard with “Tutti Frutti” in 1956. When white singers like Elvis and Bill Haley appropriated this new African-American style, record companies promoted them as the creators of rock and roll. Throughout the 50s and early 60s, African-American artists were overshadowed by the better-represented white groups who borrowed much of their strength from the energetic sound of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Elvis, and Bill Haley all later pointed to these two pioneers as their greatest influences. As the 60s moved on, the British Invasion brought with it a new appreciation for the early works of African-American musicians. Looking for the true roots of rock and roll, English bands like the Beatles, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Queen, The Who, the Yardbirds, the Animals, Van Morrison and multitudes of others overwhelmingly incorporated old Muddy Waters tunes, early Bo Diddley riffs, Ray Charles soul and Chuck Berry guitar handiwork into their chart-topping songs. Jimi Hendrix, born in Seattle, Washington and a follower of classic blues, even moved to England in order to find an audience interested in the roots of rock and roll. Eventually, American acts openly recognized the talent of the African-American pioneers and produced such names as Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Simon & Garfunkel. These homages to African-American musicians, however, were not seen as flattery but theft. In Johannes Riedel’s Soul Music Black and White, the author tells a very different tale from the black perspective:

Each successive commercialization of a black style by white Americans has stimulated the black community and its musical spokesmen to generate a new music that is a new black property… [However, w]hat is exciting about the new American music is its roots in popular music derived from the black culture. (88, 91)

The feeling of ambivalence continued throughout the 60s as the Civil Rights Movement increased in power and African-Americans began reclaiming their intellectual capital. Black music reinvented itself into funk with James Brown, and George Clinton leading the march followed closely by Kool & the Gang, Earth, Wind and Fire, and Grandmaster Flash. The experimentation of the late 60s and early 70s also opened the door to such extravagant, African-American influenced productions as Hair in 1968 and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970 to thrive and push funk and black music into the limelight. As funk progressed into the 70s, its underlying mantra of style and attitude were seized upon by the recording studios who saw a market in white teens looking for style. Lyrical content was soon replaced by rhythmic refrains and catchy beats, funk turned into disco, and black bands were pushed aside for white ones. Billboard’s 100 best records in 1973 included 36 by African-American artists; that number fell to 23 by 1977, the same year the Bee Gees released “Stayin’ Alive” for the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. Black musicians like Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, and Diana Ross had influenced Rod Stewart, the Bee Gees and Blondie, then watched as their own record sales plummeted. It was time for some “new black property.”

The World Meets Hip-Hop: Integrating Black Music Today: 1979-Present

From the rough streets of the Bronx in New York, a new sound scratched its way into clubs and the new sound of hip-hop emerged as the “new black property.” DJs and MCs of New York’s black, middle-class disco clubs and “street-class” block parties mixed records of funky James Brown tunes with some early disco beats of Grandmaster Flash as a rebellion to the sterilized, white versions of disco that flooded the radio. Many of the MCs, charged with creating a good time for all, relied on call and response techniques that harkened back to the initial Negro spirituals of the 1800s. Having toured on the local circuits of clubs and raves under the influence of notable disco DJ named Pete “DJ” Jones, Kurtis Blow recorded the first hip-hop record, “Christmas Rappin’” in 1979 and the first rap record a year later which was certified gold in 1980. Soon bolstered by Blow’s commercial success and the support of the Mercury label, other hip-hop groups stepped up to the turntable. Groups like Run-DMC, Whodini, Roxanne, the Fat Boys, and the Fresh Prince (later known to white audiences as Will Smith) recorded album after album and experimented with the new, truly-black sound. Two years after Run-DMC released their ground-breaking hard-core rap “It’s Like That” in 1983, a trio a white Jewish boys from the punk underground signed a deal with Def Jam records and became the first white rap act; they were the much criticized Beastie Boys. Over the next decade, rap and hip-hop groups would receive even more criticism from parents, religious groups, and political leaders while continuing to evolve their art.

            Rap, however, was not the only venue for African-American musicians. Pop groups carried on the earlier traditions of the Platters, the Ink Spots, and the Penguins in the new guise of a grown-up Michael Jackson who created the best-selling album of all time, Thriller in 1982, and broke racial barriers by becoming the first black artist to appear on MTV. Incidentally, one of Jackson’s white back-up singers, Sheryl Crow, would go on to record her own album with his support in 1993. Tina Turner came back to the stage and infused old-style blues into the new pop; Ray Parker, Jr. sang on the hit soundtrack to Ghostbusters; Lionel Ritchie split from the funk of the Commodores for a solo career, and Prince exemplified the strange mixture of glam rock and the smoothness of Jackie Wilson. The 90s brought a revival of many old names through a technique called sampling. The hip-hop/pop/jazz band Us3 incorporated Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” into their chart-smasher “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia).” Two years later, the white alternative band Primitive Radio Gods invoked B.B. King’s “How Blue Can You Get?” in their own hit song “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand.” Annie Lennox even recorded a cover of the Temptations’ “Can’t Get Next to You.” In almost every genre of modern music, artists were dusting off the library of African-American legends and incorporating it into their songs until today when the history of African-American music comes alive on the popular charts. White bands and black bands draw from the same source and manage to coexist. Eminem tops the charts next to Snoop Dogg; Lenny Kravitz wails along side Madonna. The 90s and the dawn of the new millennium have brought with them an acceptance and realization of the musical talent and genius of the African-American community. How long this appearance of equilibrium will last is unknown. Perhaps African-Americans will again innovate in their constant effort to forge a new, separate identity. Perhaps they will accept their identity of influence to American music. Black pride had taken many shapes since the end of the Civil War. In an ongoing effort to create a stolen identity, African-Americans clung to music as their anchor in the storm of racism and discrimination. With each new turn of their rhythms, white musicians were hot on their heels to learn the “funky” ways. Today, white audiences listen to rap, hip-hop, soul, jazz, and the blues and affirm the “blackness” of each, but they also see that the music created in the African-American communities in the United States is just as American as they are.

And they embrace it.

Bibliography

Abdul, Raoul. Blacks in Classical Music. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1977.

Bloom, Harold ed. Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

Buerkle, Jack V. and Danny Barker. Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Jazzman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Fawcett Publications, 1961.

Hughes, Langston. Ask Your Mama. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971.

Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1930.

Riedel, Johannes. Soul Music Black and White: The Influence of Black Music on the Churches. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975.

Sandburg, Carl. Smoke and Steel. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.

Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.