LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature
University of Houston-Clear Lake, spring 2003
Student Research Project

Jana Stafford
Dr. Craig White
LITR 5731-Final Essay
May 7, 2003

Slavery: The Humble Beginnings of African-American Music

O I’m gonna sing, gonna sing

Gonna sing all ‘long the way,

O I’m gonna sing, gonna sing,

Gonna sing all ‘long the way. (Work, 1)

What is known today as the African-American slave song did not completely originate in Africa or America, for the music evolved from both countries and cultures—complimenting each other even still today.  The underlying circumstances of slavery, including the desire for the people to escape and fly back home, the need for communication among the people and the unifying experiences caused by slavery, soon became the catalyst for what the music became once it reached the shores of America.       

The period in which African song first assumed a definite American character is difficult to ascertain.  Adding to the difficulty is the fact that there were very few successful attempts to collect the music and no native written records of it.  However, various references in literature suggest that Africans loved music and dancing long before coming to America.  Although Olaudah Equiano’s personal account in The Classic Slave Narratives is tainted with controversy, the critics seldom deny the historical information he supplies about the African culture:  “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets.  Every great event. . . is celebrated in public dances which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion” (33).

A great deal can be learned by looking at books written by European travelers and traders of the times.  Richard Jobson, an English captain who visited Gambia, Africa during the years 1620 through 1621 published a book entitled The Golden Trade.    Early in his travels, Jobson observed the importance of music in the African way of life noting that “there is without doubt, no people on the earth more naturally affected to the sound of musicke than these people. . . for both day and night, more especially all the night the people continue dauncing, untill he that playes be quite tyred out” (105).

Just as singing and music played an integral role in African oral language, so did the peoples’ use of storytelling, but none seem so beautiful and dreamlike as one that developed once they were bound in slavery—the myth of the flying African.  The final section of a particular account is taken from The Doctor to the Dead:  Grotesque Legends & Folk Tales of Old Charleston by John Bennett and is called “All God’s Chillen Had Wings:”

   And as he spoke to them they all remembered what they had forgotten, and recalled the power which once had been theirs.  Then all the Negroes, old and new, stood up together; the old man raised his hands; and they all leaped up into the air with a great shout; and in a moment were gone, flying, like a flock of crows, over the field, over the fence, and over the top of the wood; and behind them flew the old man.

   The men went clapping their hands; and the women went singing; and those who had children gave them their breasts; and the children laughed and sucked as their mothers flew, and were not afraid.

   The master, the overseer, and the driver looked after them as they flew, beyond the wood, beyond the river, miles on miles, until they passed beyond the last rim of the world and disappeared in the sky like a handful of leaves.  They were never seen again (139).

African-Americans began to embody this myth about flying through their almost supernatural ability to raise their voices high, singing in unison long and sorrowful tunes. African-American song then really flourished in the culture as it allowed the people a type of group escape that gave them some amount of freedom and power over their captors.  The tradition has continued for centuries, producing some of the world’s most beloved music and talented artists.

When looking at the history of African-American song, it is necessary to consider the spiritual ties that the people have had with song and verse from the time they first came to America and were converted to Christianity.  The majority of slaves were eager to learn about Christianity as it provided hope and offered a means of escape as well.  They began expressing their desire to leave this world through their spiritual music.  Particularly, slaves loved songs that had themes of escape, flying away to heaven and finding the freedom promised to all people through Christ.  Even to this day, gospel music—a genre entrenched heavily with religious themes—provides the training ground for a vast majority of famous black musicians.

We see this initial yoke to Christianity through Olaudah Equiano’s poem in The Classic Slave Narratives.  He felt so deeply moved by the benefits of Christianity that he wrote “Reflections on the State of My Mind.”  This poem gives us a three-fold example of Equiano’s desire to flee:  the actual outlet for his anger that writing the poem provides; the symbolic adaptation of the flying African theme as seen in his comparison to and desire to be like songbirds; and the topic of salvation and freedom through Christ.

   Oft times I mus’d, and nigh despair,

While birds melodious fill’d the air.

“Thrice happy songsters, ever free!”

How blest were they compar’d to me!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

   He died for all who ever saw

No help in them, nor by the law;

I this have seen and gladly own

“Salvation is by Christ alone!” (202)

            A similar pattern is seen in Frederick Douglass’ account from The Classic Slave Narratives, albeit with more focus on the importance of singing as an escape for the slave and less focus on the positives of Christianity.  When explaining the many reasons that slaves sing, Douglass referred to the loud, long, and deep tones as a tale of woe that was beyond his comprehension.  He states that slaves sing most when they are unhappy.  “The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears” (350).  He then adds that he himself has “often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness” (350). 

            Again referring to birds from The Classic Slave Narratives, Harriet Jacobs’ account of her life gives the reader a description of the freedom slaves felt while singing, in particular while singing about flying away to heaven.  “The congregation struck up a hymn, and sung as though they were as free as the birds that warbled round us,—

Ole Satan’s church is here below.

                        Up to God’s free church I hope to go.

                        Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God! (519-520)

The theme of the flying African and singing as a means of freedom are especially strong and central throughout Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.  Even the title intimates the relevance of song and verse to the African-American culture.  Pilate, the most powerful character in the novel, possesses a name that could be interpreted in two ways:  as the person who has the control, or in reference to a person with the ability to fly an aircraft, referring once again to flying.  In this framework, Pilate’s superb ability to sing should be discussed, and her dependence on it during times of trial. Readers are first introduced to Pilate, though not knowing it is her at the time, when she is singing a song which is intertwined throughout the entire novel, and is so obviously reminiscent of a blue’s tune, during one of the town’s most memorable crises.  The song she sang went like this:

                        O Sugarman done fly away

                        Sugarman done gone

                        Sugarman cut across the sky     

                        Sugarman gone home. . . (6)

This crisis following the song was that a black man wanted to fly—literally, whereupon a small boy aptly named Guitar is sent for help.  Finally and most unforgettably, at Hagar’s funeral Pilate sings of the sorrows of her heart and longs for mercy and escape at the loss of “my baby girl” (318).

The reliance on song as a means of escape was a somewhat new trend as the people of Africa were forced to come to America, but their dependence on it as a method of communicating their feelings was certainly not new.  The people customarily sang in Africa during most all times, however, there is very little mention in previous research of singing during sad times, quite possibly because slavery was their first experience of sorrow as a collective group. 

Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans: A History, discovered that Africans had bands and sang during “parades associated with various festivals and public celebrations,” to “pay homage to the king,” and “among some tribes of Angola there was a tradition for litigation music” (7).  “Music accompanied religious ceremonies and rites associated with birth, initiation, marriage, healing, going to war and death” (6). “African music of a nonceremonial type included worksongs of all kinds, hunting songs, instructional songs, social-commentary songs (including gossip and satirical songs), and entertainment music” (8).

One important aspect of the music, and one that especially shows the African-Americans’ incredible way of communicating within their music, was their call and answer style that was a carry over from African customs and was later dubbed “lining hymns.”  These songs combined the influences of three cultures, African, European and American.  The songs were often filled with themes of Christianity, as well as some of their traditional mythological subjects—causing a kind of syncretism that constituted one of the basic elements of the African-American culture.

The slaves’ ease with which they communicated through their style of music, even music that did not include words, is explained by Southern:

It may be pointed out that such communication (the African system of communicating over long distances by the use of drums called “talking drums”) is possible because of the characteristic pitch structure of the West African languages.  In sending out messages, the drummers reproduce the speech-tone inflections and the rhythms of spoken sentences (14).

            Southern continues by discussing the uncanny ability that African-American slaves had to communicate spontaneously and intuitively.

The most constant feature of African songs was the alternation of improvised lines and fixed refrains.  Without exception, contemporary writers marveled at the skill of the African musician—and even the ordinary villager—in composing tunes and texts without prior preparation.  Actually, the musical procedure involved more an embellishing of a traditional melody than the composing of a new song (16).

Frederick Douglass also addresses this phenomenon in The Classic Slave Narratives.  Moreover, he points out the slaves’ use of coded language through song to keep the white listeners in the dark and to give slaves the freedom to give voice to their thoughts:

While on their (slaves) way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wildsongs, revealing at once the highest joys and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other (348).

Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home.  They would then sing most exultingly the following words:—‘I am going away to the Great House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!’  This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves (349).

In addition, Harriet Jacobs brings forth several instances of coded language from this previously mentioned spiritual: 

Ole Satan thought he had a mighty aim;

He missed my soul, and caught my sins.

Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God!

He took my sins upon his back;

Went muttering and grumbling down to hell.

Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God!

Ole Satan’s church is here below.

Up to God’s free church I hope to go.

Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God! (519-520)

Becky Nelson, a University of Houston-Clear Lake student studying American minority literature, interprets the coded language in her “Journal on the Apocalypse and Apocalyptic Imagery as Expressed Within the Minority Experience” used in the slave song mentioned by Harriet Jacobs’ in Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl.

First, the comment that Satan had “missed my soul and caught my sins” would have been controversial in that it was not acknowledged by most slave owners that African-Americans had souls. They were considered property and treated like animals. Because this claim to a soul was couched in familiar Christian language and because music carries the hearer along, no matter what the words might say, the subversive nature of the words seems to have been lost on the white hearers. At least the full impact was lost, or they wouldn’t have allowed them to sing it.

Secondly, according to this spiritual, Satan represents the church in this world—the church in the here and now. This is an extremely subversive thought since white slaveholders ran the church, and the church is represented as belonging to Satan. A Christian’s duty would be to overthrow Satan, so it would seem that the slaves are really singing about the overthrow of the slaveholders (Nelson).

Lawrence Levine also comments on the use of language with double meaning incorporated in the slaves’ songs in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness:

   If slaves used their work songs to laugh at each other and the whites around them and to communicate their momentary desires, they used them as well to speak of the forces that affected their lives profoundly.  They sang of the white patrols and the whippings that continually harassed them (14).

One example from modern African-American literature that is pertinent in reference to communication through song can be found in looking again at the funeral scene in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.  Pilate and Reba illustrate this impulsive, almost animal-like intuition, or in musical terms—synchronization, during their amazing ability to come together in song.  Pilate was in the front of the church at Hagar’s side and simply uttered but one note when Reba, who had just entered, somehow knew exactly what Pilate wanted to sing.  Their souls seemed to communicate during their song, as though they had learned this supernatural ability straight from their African ancestors.  The song went like this:

In the nighttime.

            Mercy.

            In the darkness.

            Mercy.

            In the morning.

            Mercy.

            At my bedside.

            Mercy.

            On my knees now.

            Mercy.  Mercy.  Mercy (317-318).

Then “they (Pilate and Reba) stopped at the same time in high silence” (318) which again shows their ability to communicate with each other during their song.  Whether they used nonverbal cues or any other source for deciding when the song would end, Morrison does not directly divulge, but as a side note, it seems that the author is alluding to the mystic qualities that encompass much of the African-American culture and tradition.

Lastly on the subject of communicating the minority voice through music, one could look again at a song that Pilate, and later the children of Shalimar, sing about Jake.  When the listener first hears the song about Sugarman, they might think as Milkman did, that it was a “string of nonsense words” (302), when in reality, the children and Pilate were singing a story about their people.  Communicating stories through song was a common characteristic in the African-American culture.  The people have a long history of oral language and, as a minority group, are newer to the written language in comparison to the dominant culture.  Therefore, African-American stories through song are still prevalent today and are being passed down to the younger generations.

The abrupt nature in which the ancestors of modern-day African-Americans were made into slaves, stripped from all things familiar, including their homeland, people, culture, and language, is in sharp contrast to other American minorities, such as Native-American and Mexican-American groups.  These severed ties caused by slavery brought about a new kind of unity, one that was somewhat different from the unity that the group-oriented society in Africa produced.  This type of unity was also about survival, but in a much more desperate, powerless form. 

One of the few things that these many different tribes of Africa had in common was the desire to sing.  Frederick Douglass portrays the oneness that he felt with the slaves upon hearing their songs as reported in his narration from The Classic Slave Narratives:

To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.  I can never get rid of that conception.  Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.  If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,— and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because ‘there is no flesh in his obdurate heart’ (349).

While Douglass focuses on the unity he felt with the singing slaves because of their mutual oppression, Roger Abrahams emphasizes a different but key element in Singing the Master—that African-American slave songs were not about the individual.  “Nothing is more bothersome to African-Americans than the performer who operates for his or her own benefit and glorification—‘profiling,’ ‘showboating,’ or whatever” (159).

Levine reiterates this all-encompassing importance of group to the African-American slave rather than the individual, especially while in the midst of backbreaking work:

   Work songs, and black secular songs in general, were characteristically marked by a realistic depiction of the workers’ situation.  In this way too they provided relief by underlining the truth that the individual worker did not suffer an individual fate.  His problems were shared and understood by his fellows to whom he could be frank, with whom he could communicate in detail.  Work songs became popular when, as one singer put it, they “ would touch so close that everybody would take a liking to them and repeat them” (214)

            As slaves reached the era of emancipation, the importance that African-Americans put on the community became less and less, most poignant with respect to finding a group voice through song, and the individual more prevalent, because of the diminution of slavery.  Eugene Genovese speaks of the journey toward a more independent attitude that slaves often took in his book, Roll, Jordan, Roll: 

   But whenever possible they (slaves) sang collectively, in ways derived from Africa but rooted in their own experience.

   Imamu Amiri Baraka’s extraordinary analysis of the historical development of black music, however controversial, speculative, and tentative it may be judged, remains the indispensable introduction to the subject.  He remarks on the roots of the blues: “The shouts and hollers were strident lament, more than anything. . . As positive expression, both in themselves (the hollers) and in the legacy they left for blues singers to come, they contributed to the collective in a strikingly dialectical way, for they provided a form for a highly individualistic self-expression among a people whose very collectivity desperately required methods of individual self-assertion in order to combat the debilitating thrust of slavery’s paternalistic aggression (324).

The idea that something as positive as African-American music, and its many forms today, could have possibly birthed from slavery seems absurd at first glance, but consider the empowerment received through the trials of the horrific loss of freedom and all that it entails.   The institution of slavery appears to have been what helped catapult the African- American culture to become the innovators of such thought-provoking music as the blues, and the historic rise of black poetry, music, art, and the many forms of literature, including the folk tale genre, to this day. 

            No one can say what might have happened had the Africans not been forced into slavery in a foreign country.  Moreover, no one will ever know what would have taken place had they not had to rely, often times for survival, on their traditional and newly created forms of oral literature to escape the oppression; to communicate feelings and voice ideas; and the momentous harmony that was produced from the constant dependence on each other.  Who knows what would have been the result if the “syncretic blend of the old and the new, of the African and the Euro-American, had not resulted in a style which in its totality was uniquely the slaves’ own. . .” (Levine, 24).

According to John Lee Hooker, the blues are “not only what's happened to you, it's what happened to your foreparents and other people. And that's what makes the blues” (Levine, 237).

Works Cited

Abrahams, Roger D.  Singing the Master, The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South.  New York:  Pantheon Books, 1992.

Bennett, John.  The Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends & Folk Tales of Old Charleston.  New York:  Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1946.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Group, 1987.

Equiano, Olaudah. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Group, 1987.

Jacobs, Harriet.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin Group, 1987.

Jobson, Richard.  The Golden Trade:  A discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians.  1620 and 1621.  Trans. James Eason. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/jobson/index.html. (1 April 2003).

Levine, Lawrence W.  Black Culture and Black Consciousness.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1977.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin Group, 1977.

Nelson, Becky.  “Journal on the Apocalypse and Apocalyptic Imagery as Expressed Within the Minority Experience.”  2001.  http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731/models/projects/projects01/default.htm. (18 April 2003).

Southern, Eileen.  Black Americans:  A History.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971.

Work, John W.  American Negro Songs and Spirituals.  New York:  Crown Publishers, 1940.